Jordan Mechner previously chronicled the early portions of his career in The Making of Karateka: Journals 1982-1985 and The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993, but more recently he’s turned his illustrator’s eye to his own family history.
Replay: Memoir of an Uprooted Family is now available in bookstores in hardcover and as a downloadable ebook via First Second Books, and it tells the story of “his family’s journey through war, Nazi occupation, and everyday marital strife.”
Writing on his official website, Mechner describes Replay as “a very special [and] personal work for me” and explains that the graphic novel memoir “interweaves the story of my life as a game developer (making Prince of Persia, Karateka and The Last Express) with my dad’s flight from Vienna as a child refugee in 1938-41 through Nazi-occupied France, and my grandfather’s back story as an Austrian teenage soldier in World War I”:
In this intergenerational graphic memoir, renowned video game designer Jordan Mechner traces his family’s journey through war, Nazi occupation, and everyday marital strife.
1914. A teenage romantic heads to the enlistment office when his idyllic life in a Jewish enclave of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is shattered by World War I.
1938. A seven-year-old refugee begins a desperate odyssey through France, struggling to outrun the rapidly expanding Nazi regime and reunite with his family on the other side of the Atlantic.
2015. The creator of a world-famous video game franchise weighs the costs of uprooting his family and moving to France as the cracks in his marriage begin to grow.
Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner calls on the voices of his father and grandfather to weave a powerful story about the enduring challenge of holding a family together in the face of an ever-changing world.
The Internet Archive will be hosting a virtual Book Talk event for Replay with Mechner on March 27 at 1:00 PM (Eastern Time). It’ll be hosted by Chris Kohler of Digital Eclipse (coincidentally, the developer behind The Making of Karateka compilation for the PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S), and tickets are currently available for free.