Design Better14 Marras 2025

Video Rewind: Jordan Mechner: Pioneering game designer on creating Prince of Persia, Karateka, and a new graphic novel memoir

This is a preview of a premium episode. You can find a video version of the full episode on our YouTube channel: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dvoGPZEY1g⁠ We’ve been on the road this week, recording some in-person episodes in Portland Oregon, with Ryan Coulter—co-founder of The James Brand, and the wonderfully hilarious graphic designer Aaron Draplin. We’re excited to bring you this episodes soon, and in the meantime we’re rewinding to one of our favorite episodes this year with Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner. You may have heard that we’re publishing more video from our episodes, and you can now find a video version of this episode on YouTube. Enjoy! *** As a kid in the 80’s, Eli fell in love with games on computers like the Apple II, Commodore 64, and later the Amiga and Macintosh. One of the very first games he played was called Karateka, which was inspiring for the realistic movements of its digital karate antagonists, even on a black-and-green Apple II monitor. Our guest today, Jordan Mechner, created Karateka while an undergrad at Yale University in 1984, and it went on to be a commercial success. He followed it up with the game Prince of Persia (you’ll hear a clip from the soundtrack in the introduction, which Jordan’s father composed and which Jordan invented a way to transpose onto the Apple II’s tinny speakers before game soundtracks were widespread on the machine). Jordan documented the creation of the game in a wonderful published version of his diaries called The Making of Prince of Persia, and we spoke with him about how he taught himself the skills to build successful video games in a pre-internet era, why he journaled about his work process (and what it taught him), and about his new graphic novel Replay, a memoir recounting his own family story of war, exile and new beginnings. Karateka on the Apple IIPrince of Persia on the Apple II (play the Mac version online here) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(268)

Creative Leadership Retreat: Paul Dichter

This episode kicks off a special series recorded live at our Creative Leadership Retreat in Sonoma, which we co-hosted with our friends at September Works in late September. We gathered 40 leaders fro...

4 Marras 1h

Maurice Cherry: Revision Path creator on why attention isn’t impact

For eleven years, Maurice Cherry made a weekly podcast called Revision Path showcasing Black designers from around the world. He recorded more than 500 episodes with designers on six continents and bu...

28 Loka 51min

Tom Foley: How to pair typefaces and why the best brand fonts go unnoticed

Tom Foley didn’t set out to design typefaces. As a postgraduate student at Central Saint Martins in London, he was researching why Ireland, unlike Switzerland, the Netherlands, or Germany, never seeme...

21 Loka 40min

Kevin Flores: Find Your Inner Rebel

Kevin Flores has been part of the Design Better community for years — we first met him in 2017, while he was leading design at 23andMe, back when we were researching how design teams are structured fo...

14 Loka 39min

Randy Hunt: Notion and Etsy design leader on why the best design teams stay small

In graduate school, Randy Hunt poured his heart and soul into a poster for Milton Glaser’s class, a picture built entirely from hand lettering that read as an image from across the room and as words u...

7 Loka 40min

Matt Owens: Athletics co-founder on keeping your creative fire lit

When Aarron was fresh out of grad school, working at an agency outside Philadelphia, he and his coworkers used to crowd around a monitor to study volumeone.com. Most websites back then had a picture, ...

5 Loka 55min

Blaine Billingsley: OpenAI designer on the collaboration problem AI hasn't solved yet

Blaine Billingsley is a staff designer at OpenAI, and his path there was anything but a straight line. He studied music composition and comparative religion, played guitar in Texas for a living (he re...

23 Syys 28min

Mack Paul: Co-author of Miracle Road on designing places where innovation happens

In the mid-1950s, North Carolina was one of the poorest states in the country. Its economy ran on tobacco, furniture, and textiles — all three in decline — and its universities were turning out talent...

17 Syys 44min