BrokenSphere · CC BY-SA 3.0

A video game designer who, as a Yale student in 1984, created the bestselling martial-arts game Karateka for the Apple II, then followed it in 1989 with Prince of Persia, using rotoscoped film of real actors to animate characters more fluidly than games of the era typically managed. The game spawned a long-running franchise and a 2010 Disney film. Mechner later turned to graphic novels, writing the New York Times bestseller Templar and, in 2023, the autobiographical Replay: Memoir of an Uprooted Family.