On 7th September 1993, Jordan Mechner wrote about The Last Express in his journal. What he had to say was surprising given the context of his creative life to date: “Directing a feature film would be easy compared to the job this is going to be.”
“This” was an adventure game set on the Orient Express at the dawn of World War 1 – four days before Austria-Hungary would declare war on Serbia, to be precise – and it would be an interactive experience that would cost Mechner all his savings and the next four years of his life to make. He was embarking on an adventure nearly as perilous as the one undergone by his protagonist Robert Cath in the game, and he appears to have known it.
By this time, after developing Karateka and Prince of Persia, Mechner had taken a break from game design to attend film school and had even worked on a short film of his own. But The Last Express would mark a confluence of his interests as a writer, artist, filmmaker, and game designer. So, why go back to games? Why not tell his thrilling train story via a movie or comic book?
I recently sat down with Mechner to discuss these questions, and he recalls his transition from game making to studying film in the early 90s: “It was the chance of doing a different kind of game that drew me back into game design at a moment when I had otherwise been taking a break from games and going to film school. After Prince of Persia, I left San Francisco. I went back to New York. I learned 16-millimeter filmmaking. This is 1991 technology. I was also supervising Prince of Persia 2, and then I’d moved to Paris and made a short film in Cuba that summer. That was when the idea for The Last Express came together.”
That move to Paris is when Mechner first encountered the world of European graphic novels, specifically Italian creator Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese series, which got him thinking about cinematic experiences in comic book form. A video game seemed like a natural meeting point for the two mediums. One that Mechner couldn’t help but explore.
“I realised that technology had advanced enough that I could make a game that would actually scratch that itch,” Mechner says, “to tell a deeper story with more sophisticated themes and dialogue and working with actors while using cinematic techniques. I thought: ‘Instead of making a film, why not make a game that’s cinematic?’ And I realised that I could actually have more resources and more creative control and use a more ambitious canvas with a game in 1993 than I could as a first-time feature filmmaker.”
He founded Smoking Car Productions that same year and started staffing up to make his vision a reality. He had to hire programmers, artists, and designers, in addition to historical contractors and his co-writer on the project, friend and former colleague Tomi Pierce. All of this while starting the creative work, directing shoots for the game’s ambitious rotoscoped animation, and fundraising to keep the whole operation afloat. Mechner says it was like balancing three full-time jobs.
“It was completely all-consuming because I was interested especially in the cinematic and storytelling aspects of the game. I actually wrote all the dialogue and directed the actors in the voice recording, did the casting and directed the film shoot myself, whereas obviously that was a full-time job in itself which kind of meant putting everything else on hold for the three weeks when we did that film shoot. It was very intense.”
Still, if there’s one thing Mechner’s proven to us over his forty-plus years of auteurship, it’s that he’s an expert at turning his visions into world-expanding realities. He pressed forward and, with the help of his writing partner Pierce, dove head-first into The Last Express’ boldest promise: to create a story in which NPCs have lives of their own.
To pull off this particular magic trick, Mechner and Pierce mapped out the game’s broad story beats. In case you’re unfamiliar with the story of The Last Express, the protagonist and American adventurer Robert Cath boards the Orient Express via a daring motorcycle stunt to track down his friend, Tyler Whitney. However, when Cath finds Whitney dead in his compartment, he is forced to assume his friend’s identity and finish the job he started, which culminates in the discovery of a strange artifact and an investigation into the powers it contains. When the outline of the plot was finalised, Mechner took this plan and wrote dialogue for each of the thirty characters, mapping their actions to a master schedule, and collaborating with Smoking Car’s coding team to bring the story to life.
“We basically had to specify everything that they would do on a timeline, from the time the train leaves the station to the end over the three days and three nights of the trip,” he says. “So, I kind of wrote it in a pseudo-code and then gave it to the programmers. They coded it, but they were just down the hall, so they would come back to me and ask for clarification and so forth. It was really quite detailed, trying to anticipate every possible encounter and then find these opportunities to use little moments of action and dialogue. Some of them are critical to advance the plot, others are not, but they still fill out the story.”
But while the story takes place aboard the Orient Express and concerns the unraveling of a high-stakes mystery, Mechner doesn’t claim Agatha Christie’s foundational piece of detective fiction Murder on the Orient Express as an influence. In fact, he says, “the real models” for The Last Express were old Alfred Hitchcock films and Indiana Jones rather than Christie’s novel, citing North by Northwest, The 39 Steps, and The Lady Vanishes as particular touchstones. “The film The Third Man about an American in Europe was a big one” as well, he says, along with John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon. This makes sense, given Mechner’s obvious love for classic films and the craft of movie-making. However, it came as a bit of a shock to me. Mechner chuckles when I admit this to him.
“I probably walked into that one,” he says. “Like, I asked for it by calling it the Orient Express because that story is so famous. But Christie’s version is a locked room murder mystery. It just happens to be on a stopped train. Whereas, in The Last Express, it’s a train that’s moving. It crosses Europe, and then by the end, it becomes a runaway train. There’s a hijacking. You’re fighting the hijackers, trying to save the train, and, of course, war is breaking out around you.”
When he puts it that way, it’s easy to see the game’s actual inspirations shine through. “I was also heavily influenced by European graphic novels,” Mechner continues. “This was 1993. I was an American who loved comics but didn’t know this whole other universe. I had just discovered Hugo Pratt, and Corto Maltese was one of the main, one-to-one influences when it came to the game. Corto Maltese was the hero of a series of graphic novels that are much loved in France, not really known in the US so much, but he travels and goes on adventures in the early 20th century, often getting mixed up in revolutions and historical events. So, I think maybe kind of a mix of Corto Maltese, Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, The Third Man – that was really the model.”
One of the more fascinating ways that Mechner’s influences bleed through in his game is in his desire to develop an emotional response in the player that goes beyond the typical “good guys versus bad guys” trope that a lot of mainstream media was falling into at the time. Again, his commitment to screenwriting and film drew him toward complex characters, like the ones he studied so intently in his favorite movies.
“What’s interesting about adventure stories, like The Third Man or a Hitchcock film, is the ambiguity, the nuance, the irony,” he says. “So, there was all of the opportunity to do that in a story about a naive American trying to get involved in this very complex European situation with the espionage and different factions on the eve of World War I – and trying to do good. It’s a very interesting and rich historical period. And I think that to tell a story like that, an author has to embrace complexity and multiple points of view.”
Indeed, understanding The Last Express’ plot in full requires a fairly in-depth knowledge of European politics and perception leading up to the war, as much of the game’s conflict is driven by the heightened tensions that existed between national interests during this time. However, when I first played it with my dad at age 12, I knew next to nothing about the time period and still had a great time. This speaks to Mechner’s writing and vision for the game, in addition to its superb voiceover, acting, and art style, which all hold up to this day. That’s pretty amazing considering the fact that it’s been nearly 25 years since The Last Express hit store shelves in 1997.
Still, to make sure that audiences could engage enthusiastically with the story he was endeavoring to tell, Mechner had to be meticulous with his vision. He knew he wanted to push rotoscoping – the act of drawing over live footage to create animated key frames – to its limit. However, staying away from the look of other full-motion video (FMV) games of the 90s would be key to making sure his story stood the test of time.
“I wanted to get away from the digitized video FMV look of the 90s for several reasons,” he tells me. “First, I just thought it was ugly. I also thought there was something about full motion video that kind of worked against the illusion of interactivity. Because the minute that you realize that you’re watching actors who’ve been filmed, you kind of sit back and just watch the video play because that’s a cue that you can’t do anything that’s going to cause the characters to act differently.”
Mechner had used rotoscoping to great effect in Karateka and Prince of Persia to rig and animate a small figure with an emphasis on action platforming. But The Last Express would be entirely different. In order to achieve his desired look for the game, Mechner decided to rotoscope each character in much greater detail, including close-ups of their faces and the natural movements of their bodies in all sorts of situations, from eating in the dining car to jumping through the window of a moving train. It was a gargantuan effort, and Mechner directed it all from start to finish.
“It was particularly important to us to capture the nuances of facial expressions and gestures. Everybody has their own way of walking, so that you can recognize them even at a distance. And the faces of the characters are very distinctive – we cast actors who had very specific looks and physiognomy. So, really the idea was to try to do a comic book come-to-life and to also evoke the pen and ink drawings of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and the French-European art nouveau style that we associate with things like French poster art of the time – the Moulin Rouge and so forth.”
Suffice to say, it worked. In spite of the game’s flopping sales at the time of its release, The Last Express still holds its own compared to a lot of modern games, so you can imagine the extent to which it blows its contemporaries out of the water when we look back on them today. Mechner agrees: “FMV games published around the same time as The Last Express looked dated two years later, whereas our game – though it’s 25 years old – in a way it hasn’t aged. The resolution is low, and you can see that, but artistically I think it still holds up today.”
The game’s story also has legs, and Mechner spent a year between 2010 and 2011 adapting The Last Express into a feature film with Dutch director Paul Verhoeven. Though it was never made, you can still view the original script that Mechner wrote right here for free.
Throughout our conversation, I get the impression that Mechner is nothing if not humbly generous. He’s got a mind full of bright ideas for emerging media, and this more than anything is what allowed him to ride the cutting edge of video games all the way to successful careers in the fields of game design, screenwriting, and graphic novel creation. He lives the art life to this day in France and still looks back fondly on the entire undertaking that was The Last Express.
“Yeah, we really swung for the fences,” Mechner says. “I’m very proud that the story and characters work. That, even though it was very ambitious in its scope and its themes, I think it really comes across and players appreciate that. I still get people telling me today how much the game meant to them and that it was an experience unlike any other they had.”
I’m one of those very people. The Last Express was my first memorable video game experience. Playing it on the couch on my father’s iPad during the holidays spawned a life of writing and thinking about interactive media. That’s the power that a well-rendered story can contain, and Mechner has dedicated his own life to the art of harnessing this force.
