It may be well-loved by people who know about it, but The Last Express doesn't enjoy quite the same kind of popularity as Karateka or Prince of Persia. Mechner offered a few reasons for why that might be. "In terms of numbers of copies sold, it's true that Last Express can't compare to POP, which has sold 17 million games," he said. "PC point-and-click adventure games are a much smaller category than console action games. This was especially true in 1997, when Last Express came out. We might have hoped we'd be the rare breakout exception that would sell millions of copies on PC alone, like MYST, but the reality is that would have been extremely unlikely even with a major marketing campaign — which we didn't have. It's a different kind of game."

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"To follow the POP analogy," Mechner elaborates, "if Last Express were a movie, it wouldn't be a Disney-Bruckheimer summer blockbuster." The movie analogues are different. "It's closer to Alfred Hitchcock or Graham Greene — a thinking person's thriller, like The Third Man or Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy, about a particular moment in 20th-century European history, with some elements that are quite dark and even tragic."

Of course, he's excited that a new generation of players will get to experience The Last Express. "I never imagined that the people of the future would want to use their amazing futuristic devices, like the iPhone, to play 20-year-old games," he says. But, now that that's happening, Mechner wishes another game that came out in the 1990s would find its way to mobile platforms. "Grim Fandango! I'd love to have that on my iPad. Tim, are you listening? Call George Lucas!"

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The Last Express