American McGee is quite an interesting personality. There are a lot of really cool ideas in the head of a game designer. Take, for example, American McGee’s Alice, where Wonderland, after Alice’s mental trauma, turned from a blooming, joyful place into an abode of grief, suffering, cruelty. Or the game Bad Day L.A., which, despite the absolute crookedness of the gameplay, is a satire on many American fears: the war with Mexico, a biological attack, a zombie invasion, and the like. But these ideas came from somewhere, right?? What was his path? Is it finished? I will try to answer these and other questions here, in the biography of Americana.
Childhood. Time to work at id Software.
McGee was born on December 13, 1972 in Dallas, Texas. Attended Woodrow Wilson High School. His mother named him American; when asked about his name, he answered:
The most common question I get asked in person and via email is: “Is American your real name?”?"Answer: yes, that’s what my mother named me. She claims the name was inspired by a college friend who named her daughter "America.". She also says she was thinking about calling me "Obnard". My mother has always been a very eccentric and creative person.
At the age of twelve, he was caught stealing a modem from a computer store. Mom reacted quite “normally”: put him in jail, police, teach him a lesson. But before the prison, Americana was shown in handcuffs through a store.
Even after these events, the younger McGee wanted to tinker with technology, so his parents gave him coffee cans full of “string, tape and wires.”.
At eleven, McGee received his first computer from his uncle, on which he began to learn to code in BASIC. And at the age of thirteen he met his own father (yes, the boy lived with his mother and stepfather).
It was at his sister’s house in Dallas, on American’s 13th birthday. There was a father in the house with a guitar in his hands and a bottle next to him. Since dad was drunk, he invited his son to give him a ride home in his truck. Then Senior McGee asked to visit. And then he attacked American, saying something like this: “I brought you into this world, and now it’s time to remove you.”. The old man tried to kill the boy by squeezing out the eye sockets with his thumbs. However, in an unknown way, American convinced his father to go to a bar and get drunk.
McGee said.
But time passed, and Americana turned sixteen years old. School ended, the young man came to his home and found it completely empty. Now the younger McGee was on his own. The work was varied – dishwasher, jewelry ring polisher, auto repairman. During breaks, I wrote programs for inventory and customer tracking.
“One day a database programmer from American Airlines came in,” recalls American, “and was shocked by what he saw. Said: "Boy. Do you have any idea how much money you could make??’“
At the end of 1992, McGee first became a neighbor and then a friend of John Carmack, co-founder of id Software, who saw talent in his friend and invited him to work in technical support. American accepted the offer.
Work at id Software, Electronic Arts. First own game.
At first, American tested individual levels of Wolfenstein 3D, but after a few months he began to work on environment design and sound. It is McGee who should be thanked for the ambiance of the locations of the first two Quakes.
John Carmack saw Americana as a replacement for Romero, who by that time was becoming increasingly proud. Everything was serious. So much so that a count was kept of the number of maps created by John R. and McGee for the second Doom. However, both Romero and American left id Software. One – to make your own shooter-killer of everyone and everything (as you know, unsuccessfully). The other one initially worked at ION Storm on Dominion 3 and Timeline, but quickly came to Maxis. And then he became the creative director of EA and began working on his best (according to many, if not all) and famous game – American McGee’s Alice.
American said in an interview that leaving his job at id Software was the right decision, but he “<. >I’m very grateful to the guys from id for everything they did for me and for the time we spent together.”.
As McGee said, EA management asked to make a new original project. For several weeks, the game designer thought through the concept and main ideas of the future game, but nothing came to mind. Then he decided to concentrate in a very original, but ordinary for American, way – "<. >I got behind the wheel of my car and set off to drive along the highway at breakneck speed.". As McGee said:
During the trip I was listening to a CD by The Crystal Method and in one of the tracks I heard the word “Miracle”. At that same moment, I began to mentally build an associative series: “Miracle, Wonderland, Alice…” And the next moment I decided that I would definitely create a dark game about Alice.
Work on the script, character sketches, and preparation of concept documents took a month, after which all this was sent to the management of Electronic Arts. The project was given the green light.
American met Norm, the main artist of the game who designed all the main characters, through a piece of paper with a sketch depicting Alice with a knife in her hands. Despite the fact that the drawing was done hastily, and even distorted by a fax, McGee liked it.
The first information about the development appeared on August 7, 1999 from the former head of id Software Alexander Barrett at QuakeCon. It became known that the game would be made by the Rogue Entertainment studio; a single-player campaign with a third-person view and multiplayer with a first-person view were planned. They decided to tie the plot to the original books by Lewis Carroll, the genre is 3D shooter. On August 13, EA officially announced American McGee’s Alice and announced the opening of a website where art, trailers, and the like were published.
American admitted that he was not happy about his name in the title of the game. However, EA did a good PR campaign around this, and the idea of creating an entire franchise was in the heads of executives. Moreover, according to McGee, his name on the cover relegates other developers to the background.
On September 26, 2000, the game’s producer, nongamstopcasinosites.co.uk Berg, spoke about why the game would not have multiplayer:
This version of American McGee’s Alice is designed to provide the most seamless single-player experience we could create. We didn’t think we could support this level in multiplayer. There are significant difficulties in doing this – and the known limitations of existing technologies are by no means trivial. We would love to release Alice on the Internet, but not in the current implementation of the game.
Initially, Marilyn Manson was invited to develop the soundtrack for the game, whose composition was noted by McGee as “very cool”. Despite this, the composer left the project quite early, but his contribution to the final product remains in The Mad Hatter. Also in the in-game files you can find thanks to Menson.
The final score was composed by Chris Vrenna in collaboration with guitarist Mark Blazquez and singer Jessica Addams of Jack Off Jill and Scarling. Most sounds are created using vintage toy instruments, music boxes, clocks and doors. Female voices were selected and processed to create an eerie-sounding chorus: maniacal laughter, screaming, crying and singing in an eerie, childish way created a dark, yet melancholic OST for the game. Some tracks, notably "I’m not Edible", contain the melody of the chorus of the children’s song "My Grandfather’s Clock".
It must be said that in the official soundtrack you can hear phrases from the game, some of which you won’t hear in it. Why this was done is unclear.
The demo version of the game was unofficially released on November 20, 2000, officially – December 1, 2000. The main difference from the full version, except, of course, the duration, is the beginning of the game. The original starts with an intro in which Alice falls into the first level, while in the demo the main character jumps there herself. Another incomplete version shows a mental hospital(?), clearly disfigured by the girl’s psyche.
McGee thought through several plot options. For example, one of the scenarios began with Alice returning home, where she was hit in the head with a bottle. So she ended up in Wonderland. After defeating some enemies, in her delirium in reality, the girl killed her parents.
The game was released on December 5, 2000 in the USA, on January 21, 2001 in Japan under the name “American McGee’s Alice in Nightmare”, on December 27, 2000 in Poland, and in Russia on November 10, 2002. It was then that Soft Club officially localized the game, and with very high quality – the actors sound convincing, the sound is high-quality, the translation does not cause a feeling of shame and it is always clear what or who is being talked about in a dialogue or monologue.
vote. They… do not match the original. So much so that Alice sounds like a girl of about 12 years old, the Cat is also not as good as in the original (he’s really, really cool there), and the other characters have problems. Although I admit that these are my personal nitpicking.
American McGee’s Alice received high marks from critics. They liked the design of the environment, the music, the characters, many people liked the plot, and they responded mostly positively to the gameplay. The game was at the top of sales in the US for some time, and, of course, it paid for itself in full.
The game included a log of Alice’s stay at the Routledge Clinic. It described events in the real world both before the start of the game and during its action. And if you start doing annologies, you can find out that some characters in Wonderland have their prototypes in a mental hospital. For example, the Hatter is Alice’s doctor.
Free swimming. Dreams of Oz. Scrapland and a terrible game with a cool idea – Bad Day in Los Angeles. Fairy tale world Grim.
McGee left EA after the game was released. In 2001, he founded his own company, Carbon 6 Entertaiment, which announced American McGee’s Oz in 2003. The plot was based on the first two books – “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” and “The Land of Oz”. The plot was like this:
Briefly, the plot of the game is as follows: the magic of the great wizard of Oz turned the town of Munchkin into ruins. Powerful spells killed and maimed thousands of inhabitants. The surviving inhabitants decided to avenge the dead by creating a powerful army of military vehicles. Together with them, they razed the wizard’s castles to the ground and moved on, destroying everything in their path. Even the sorceresses, the once kind and noble rulers of the land of Oz, returned to the old witchcraft and took part in the battles.
Seeing that the unfolding chaos would soon engulf the entire country of Oz, the inhabitants of the kingdom of Night called upon the Messiah from the land of people to stop the bloody war and reconcile the warring nations. And the Messiah came..
The game was supposed to be a kind of noir, dark GTA, where there would be no place for senseless violence. “In fact, you can combine almost any items and magic obtained in the game with each other in order to create new weapons and magic spells,” said McGee. There would be several biomes with their own flora, fauna and mood.
According to McGee, in September 2004 “Oz was about 30% ready,” but in September of the same year the project was frozen. There were also plans for a film and a book based on. McGee: "On the film side, we sold the rights to Oz to Disney. The film will be directed by Jerry Bruckheimer (“Pirates of the Caribbean”). I’m currently working on a script."
During the same period, American was thinking about another game – American McGee’s Grimm, which would show dark versions of various fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm, but the project was frozen at an early stage. McGee also wanted to create City of the Dead, “the scariest and darkest game” together with George Romero. According to the game designer, Resident Evil is no match for his new project. The only question is: where is he?? Hip Interactive Euro stated that the game was closed due to the extremely low quality of the product, which makes me think.
Actually, a screenshot from the game. I wonder how bad the game looked dynamically that its development was canceled. You can’t tell much from the trailer.
One way or another, our story smoothly moved on to the main game of this period (before Bad Day L.A., that is) — American McGee’s Presents Scrapland. People only learned about McGee’s participation in 2004. An excerpt from an interview with Igromaniya with American (original spelling and punctuation preserved):
[Gaming addiction]: Welcome! The first question that literally doesn’t let us sleep at night is how it happened that your name suddenly ended up in the name of Scrapland?
[American McGee]: I have known Trevor Chan, the head of Enlight, for many years and, to be honest, we had been planning to work together for a long time. So it’s kind of a dream come true. And Scrapland is the first project I’m producing for Enlight. My official title is “executive producer.”.
The game was created by MercurySteam Entertainment, which previously released Severance: Blade of Darkness when Rebel Act Studios was still there. There is not much information about American’s participation due to his position – when the community learned about the game designer’s arrival at the studio, the game was close to release (and it was released on November 4, 2004 in America on personal computers), but McGee watched the game closely. Here’s what he thought about her:
What pleased me most about Scrapland was its originality in everything from gameplay to plot. As for changes, games always go through them. Now we are tweaking the balance, working on the soundtrack and dialogues – making the game a little more accessible to the general public. In general, when I first saw Scrapland, I realized that I simply had to participate in the project.
The game was about Di-Tritus, a robot who arrived on his space bike to Chimera (which is a terribly polluted Earth), gets a job as a reporter and his first task – to interview the Archbishop. The task cannot be completed – at first the mayor of the city does not accept the journalist, and then it turns out that he was killed in his oil jacuzzi. But the robot cannot be restored – someone stole the matrix from the Great Database. This is where the game begins.
The genre is a mixture of GTA, arcade air battles on various ships and foot adventures, during which you can switch to another robot.
Scrapland received widely varying reviews. For example, IGN rating is 8.2 points with the phrase: “I would like more variety in the single player game… However, the game refreshes the feeling of your own victories like no other.» Game Informer gave the project a 6.5 out of 10, noting the very boring on-foot portions of the game, created "just to annoy players.» Many praised the appearance of locations and characters, the graphics in general and air battles on ships. Average score on MetaCritic: 73 points.
The game also had some pretty upbeat music. Some tracks rock, although you won’t find anything super cool like Alice’s here. However, this does not prevent the soundtrack from being very good. Actually, he. www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMFdpzM-Sfs
McGee’s next game is notorious to all who care. The project turned out to be so bad that upon release it received an average rating of 3.1 point. Everything was criticized – inferior plot, flat and UNfunny humor, stupid AI, crooked gameplay, and so on. People wondered how it was possible to release this? But something good could have turned out, eh..
The idea to make a game about an apocalypse day in Los Angeles came to Americana when he was driving a car and saw a billboard that said the following: “Biochemical terrorist attack! Are you ready?» McGee:
For me, this billboard was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Suddenly I felt an overwhelming urge to do something about this issue.
I don’t want to dwell on this piece, sorry for my French, it’s long. Yes, there were various interviews. We can say that the game was advertised quite heavily, there were huge ambitions. The choice of Anthony, a homeless man who doesn’t care about anything, was deliberate (and interesting, I must say), but his development in the game is zero. And there are too many of these “buts”. The only thing that needs to be said: the game is a third-person shooter, absolutely linear. Was in debriefing.
In a future interview McGee will say this is Bad Day L.A. – his worst project both in sales and in organizing production. So it’s quite possible that the game was remade several times, assembled on the knee in 2 months or something like that. No specifics.
You haven’t forgotten about American McGee’s Grimm? It became the game designer’s next project and the first of his new Shanghai studio Spicy Horse, founded in 2007. About how the concept was born, McGee said: “One day, me and Ken went to milk the goats: No, seriously, my memory is all in a fog now. I only remember that we were working on a plot and an idea, on a character that had the effect of the King Midas touch. Everything he touched became dark, sick and died."And this phrase can describe the entire gameplay – we will simply darken the world around us throughout the game, thereby strengthening ourselves. And there was also a platformer. Extremely simple. It seemed like an interesting experience. But doing this over 24 episodes, each of which lasts from 30 to 60 minutes, is boring, to say the least. Well, at least the first one is distributed free of charge, so you can watch it and, if you like it, buy it. Moreover, you can buy any episode separately, highlighting the fairy tales that interest you. The full list can be found on Steam.
To quote McGee: “Familiar with Katamari Damacy (2004) for PlayStation 2? There you have to roll, but here you have to transform, t.e. travel the world changing light to dark. You know, until you play it yourself, you won’t understand what it looks like.»
The game received pretty good ratings – about 6.5. On Steam, out of 207 reviews, 88% of them are positive. It came out a bit messy. It’s not surprising though. Before every storm there comes a calm.
Art work by Ken Wong, Ben Kerslake, and Tyler Lockett. In total there were about 30 people involved in painting, which accounted for more than 50% of the entire studio.
Phase three. Spicy Horse, new Alice, mobile games, even more Alice.
After Grim, McGee began creating all kinds of mobile games. I would dwell on them in more detail, but there is nothing unusual about them. Except in Akaneiro: Demon Hunters, Spicy Horse’s latest game, we played as Little Red Riding Hood. The project was another Diabloid, that is, a clone of Diablo. Did good design save the game?. Received average grades (about 5.5) and was forgotten.
DexIQ (2009), American McGee presents: Crooked House (2010), American McGee presents: Angry Red, Crazy Fairies (2012), Akaneiro: Demon Hunters. (2013)
The first and last big game was Alice: Madness Returns. It was known from the very beginning that McG’s new project would be a sequel. The proposal to make a sequel to the original Alice came from Electronic Arts. American and Berg (executive producer of American McGee’s Alice) received this information with enthusiasm. Also, McGee’s friend was the author of the script. The pre-production stage began in mid-2008, officially announced by EA on February 19, 2009. Ken Wong became the art director, while the studio was finishing its previous episodic game by the end of April. Therefore, the staff was increased only after the completion of American McGee’s Grimm. It was planned to release the game for PC and consoles – PS3, Xbox 360. According to the artistic director, the game was frozen after signing an agreement with EA due to the global financial and economic crisis, but after several months the project was unfrozen.
The game’s budget was about 15 million US dollars. But if the game had been developed in the USA, more money would have been required – 30 million. McGee himself said so.
The new Alice was released on June 14, 2011 in the USA, three days later in the rest of the world. Critics were divided into two camps – some really liked the game (Gleb Meshcheryakov, for example, rated “Amazing”), while others did not like the lengthy gameplay, platforming and meager combat system. That’s why the average score is only about 74 on Metacritic. However…
There is such a thing as a beta version of the game and cut content. If you look at it, it will become clear why the project turned out this way. So, what was removed: almost all of London. The plan was to escape from the police (after all, out of fear, Alice threw one bestial old woman from the roof of a high-rise building out of fear) across the roofs of houses, slow down time and engage in shootouts with representatives of the law (yes, this is not a joke). The boss battle at the end of the first chapter was cut due to technical difficulties. In the water world (in some episodes) Alice and other characters had to swim, but the reasons are the same – hard and long. The white rabbit was given MUCH less attention in the final version than originally. His role was almost as important as that of the Cheshire Cat.
There were combo attacks for the knife, in which copies of Alice appeared, and also the Fire Whip, about which little is known. Many phrases and some scenes were cut out (for example, the main character, after one of her trips to Wonderland, found herself in the room in which a terrible murder occurred). Reworked locations, removed some puzzles. Obviously, the game should have been more intense, but none of that happened.
Sales were quite good, but EA had no intention of making a sequel. Then McGee wanted to create it himself under the name Alice: Otherlands, which would continue the story of the girl, but there is one “but”: the rights to the franchise belong to Electronic Arts and no one else. In May 2011, American reported that the plot for a potential third game had already been written, but it would only be released if there was interest. The plans were not destined to come true. In June 2012, it finally became known that the game was not worth waiting for. The reason is simple: EA was not interested in such a project. Then there was Kickstarter, where the game was positioned as an MMO, in which the missions were not places, but people. It was planned to be able to penetrate the minds of other characters and change them or find out something about their past (and at that time Jack the Ripper was operating. Do you get the hint??). The idea was criticized by fans, and instead of the game, the money raised through crowdfunding went towards a series of short animated films. There were two of them – Leviathan and Night at the Opera. Released in 2015, October 31. To put it mildly, they do not shine with quality, and the second one is also extremely incomprehensible, to say the least – meaningless. But there’s something about the first episode that I like. Why – I don’t know myself.
Remember the game about the world of the Wizard of Oz?? There was another attempt to create a game in this universe – OZombie. The setting was steampunk, a lot of, as the name implies, zombies, and a world that does not exist in Dorothy’s head, but is a “real” continent. McGee wrote about the game:
You’ll see a variety of visual styles as you travel through Oz. This is because the world of Oz is very diverse – here the Kingdoms exist in underground caves and glass bubbles under water. The country’s inhabitants are very diverse, and I will try to use their differences in order to emphasize issues of social conformity and freedom of choice (all in relation to the idea of conformity).
In terms of genre, I hope that we can present psychological horror that goes beyond the "gore". I believe that games as an artistic medium have not yet been fully exploited. But we’re starting to see great examples of designs that create "horror" in the hearts of players – such as when you’re forced to make a decision that goes against your moral principles.
But it didn’t work out. There were two reasons. The main one was sluggish collections (in 4 weeks, a little more than 140 thousand dollars were collected out of 950 thousand requested). Second, it was necessary to close one campaign to open another (two projects cannot exist simultaneously from the same people).
On July 30, 2016, American closed Spicy Horse Studios, thanking all employees and fans for their support. At the end of her life there were only 6 people working, so it was not surprising. Now McGee is looking for normal funding for his new game – Alice: Asylum. It should be a prequel to the original game. On Patreon, the game designer posts concept art from artists working on the project, as well as a variety of merchandise: dolls, bags, toys, even cosmetics. EA is not against the game, but they will not give money. American’s personal life is settled – he lives in China, is married, and recently (at the end of August) had a child. Whether to wait for the game is a difficult question, because even McGee himself is not sure whether it will eventually be released. But the quality of art is growing, as is their quantity, so with extremely moderate optimism, but we can wait. But not necessarily.
There is a group on VKontakte where they post all the information about the game and links to streams. Here’s the band name: American McGee’s ALICE & Alice: Madness Returns.
What’s the result?? A long and thorny path with a lot of ideas ruined for various reasons, fame for only three games – the series about Alice and Bad Day L.A. -, a bunch of mobile games that no one remembers. McGee’s ambition is surprising. Put the heroine of a children’s fairy tale in a mental hospital, and turn her Wonderland into a nightmare? Easily. Create an apocalyptic day in which all American fears will take on material form? Hold. American was a very brave man. But not all of his surviving projects were good. And his ideas were, to some extent, a reflection of his childhood pain. But, interestingly, only he of the trio of id Software remained (albeit relatively) afloat. If McG doesn’t make a good Alice: Asylum, I think his career will be over. I, contrary to common sense, am waiting for his new game.
I learned about American McGee’s Alice from Retrozor quite a long time ago, but I didn’t play it for quite a long time. There were other projects that were more suitable for me. Forgot for a while. About 2 years later my friend reminded me about the game, but even then I had no desire to play it. Only in December 2018 I sat down to the duology and experienced a lot of positive emotions. The plot, the music, even the gameplay made me happy, the environment design delighted me. By the way, did you look closely at the people in London in the second Alice?? They’re all deliberately caricatured. But not the main character. About 2 months later it was the turn of Scrapland, which I liked largely for its air battles. These are the things.