Jordan Mechner is a name you might recognize. He is perhaps best known as the man behind the hit games Karateka and the original Prince of Persia back in the days of the Apple II. He also worked on the adventure game The Last Express, as well as the 2003 reboot of the Prince of Persia series, The Sands of Time, which he later helped adapt into a film that actually turned out to be pretty decent. He’s tackled games, movies and comics over his lengthy career, and now he’d like to put that experience to good use as a Director of the Writer’s Guild of America.
Mechner aims to use his diverse career experience to help bridge the gap between game, film and graphic novel writers, helping them to better understand each other as the different industries continue to interact more and more frequently:
“20 years ago, video games, movies/TV, and graphic novels were separate worlds. Increasingly, they overlap. I’ve worked in all three enough to know first-hand how differently they think. I’ve created original IPs, written for hire, and adapted works from one medium into another. I want us to understand one another’s worlds better.”
Video games are certainly being turned to as source material for movies fairly often these days, though the results tend to be mediocre at best and disastrous at worst. Sometimes we get something with potential like the Sands of Time movie, but more often we get incomprehensible garbage that barely resembles its game counterparts, like the Resident Evil film series, or the entire film catalog of Dr. Uwe Boll. Could having someone with an appreciation for the medium high up in the ranks of the WGA do anything to change this? It’s worth a shot if you ask me.
Yes, he is actually a Doctor, apparently.
You can read more about Mechner’s campaign on his official website.
