American McGee is one of the veterans of the gaming
industry. Having worked at id Software, EA, and now having founded his own
company Spicy Horsein Shanghai, he has amassed a portfolio of amazing games.
Some of his most well-known titles are “American McGee’s Alice,” “Alice:
Madness Returns,” “American McGee’s Grimm,” and “Scrapland.” McGee has worked
on multiple platforms and is now working to bring back “Alice” as a film
platform and was working on creating a new game based on the Wizard of OZ
universe by L. Frank Baum by the working name of OZombie. After the interview
took place McGee suspended the Kickstarter for “OZombie” to focus on obtaining
the rights to the “Alice” film. A new Kickstarter for the “Alice” film rights
should be starting very soon. Since the interview covered a lot more than just
“OZombie” we decided to continue publishing it. Thanks very much to American
McGee and the people at Spicy Horse that worked to allow us to do this
interview.
One of the things,
I’ve never read any of Baum’s OZ books, I grew up with the MGM film, I knew
there were books but I did not know there were that many of them. Besides the
idea that OZ was a dream, what are the other major theme differences between
what you’re doing with OZombie and the actual original works?
That is a good question, because if you read about Baum and
his feelings about consistency and continuity you’ll discover that he wasn’t
very concerned with maintaining continuity. For instance in one book he might
have mentioned that death in Oz was a possibility and in the next book he might
state it is impossible to die in Oz and in yet another book again come back to
the idea that death was possible. There is a lot of inconsistency in the book
and that is fine for us as my intention is to create a history of OZ or a
moment in OZ that is far beyond the time that you’ve read in the books or seen
in the films. One of the biggest differences is that you’ll be running around
not with Dorothy but with Dorothy’s great-great-granddaughter. That helps to
give you a sense of how much time has passed.
Does OZ remember the
original Dorothy or is she consigned to the realm of myth and legend?
I think that I haven’t really gotten to that bridge yet in
terms of figuring out if we’re going to answer the question or if that’s even
critical to the story. At the moment it’s really about the major characters
that I know are going to be involved in this new story. That would be Dorothy
as the hero, the Scarecrow as the main enemy and then the allies I know Dorothy
is going to align herself with such as the Tin Woodsman and the Lion and so
forth. Whether or not we run into the original Dorothy is something I’d rather
not say yet.
You said on your
Kickstarter page, which I thought was really cool as I am a huge sci-fi fan,
that you’re a huge Robert Heinlein fan. Which Heinlein books influenced you the
most or you would recommend reading before playing OZombie?
Well I think that is hard to say which one sort of
influenced me the most because I read them all when I was in high school and
maybe a little earlier than that. I read through just about every single one of
the books he wrote. “Stranger in a Strange Land” is one that I’ve probably read
more than the others. But you know there are books of his that are less
philosophical, less political like the “Stairway to Heaven” which are more
scientific. I think that’s Heinlein but it might have been Arthur C. Clark. I’m
getting my sci-fi authors mixed up. But definitely for the social and political
influence there are things like I said, “Stranger in a Strange Land,” that I
can remember to this day that are definitely influencing my thoughts going into
the OZombie story.
“Stranger in a Strange
Land” is one of my favorites, that and “Farmer in the Sky.” Those are two of my
favorite Heinleins myself.
Yeah, and you know there is a book of his called “Number of
the Beast” that actually features characters going to the World of OZ. So you
know there is a connection there where he has written an extension to the OZ
mythos himself.
Interesting, I don’t
think I’ve ever read that one.
Yeah number of the beast is one his more controversial
books. It’s one that some people say is the worst thing he ever wrote and some
people say is the best thing he ever wrote because it is a very
self-referential writer’s book. It’s just sort of he’s showing you all the
tropes and making obvious the tricks writers use and all of the things you
should not do when writing. It is a very interesting read.
I’ll have to pick
that up. What other literary or other influences are you using to kind of, or
that inspired you in creating OZombie.
Well actually a lot of the themes you’re going to find in
here are what you’re would describe as Orwellian. You know, inspired by books
like “1984” or “Animal Farm” in that there is definitely a very political slant
to them. What we’re seeing the Scarecrow do to this world is very much inspired
by events that we’ve seen happen in our history and events that are unfolding
around us today of people in power using manipulation and deceit to control
populations. And this was actually a topic touched upon by Baum in his books.
It was a theme he was exploring though these of course these are books were
great for children. There is still that sense of kind of political exploration
and commentary contained within them. Orwell would be the other major influence
for that kind of content in the game.
“1984” is one of the
best books I’ve ever read, also one of the scariest.
Yeah it’s scary but you know what’s really scary about that
book, I just recently re-read it. What’s really scary about it is how much its
beginning to mirror the world we live in today.
Yeah it was meant as
a commentary not as an instruction manual.
Yeah, exactly.
Well as an action
adventure game, how linear would you consider OZombie to be? I know there is a
class system from the Kickstarter notes but is there a leveling system that
would prevent you from getting to certain areas until you complete certain
objectives or is the world open to you from the start?
This is certainly not an open world game. This is a linear
story though we are going to do branches within the story. But those branches
are more in an adventure game format. Once you begin down a branch, once you’ve
made a decision, those decisions remain with you and affect whatever is going
to happen as you go forward. We are not trying to present an open world. We are
trying to present a story with multiple but possible middles and endings.
Ah that’s awesome. I
love a game that kind of goes with the player’s play style and moral choices.
It kind of gives them their freedom to see what their choices do. There are not
a lot of games that do that effectively.
Yeah and I think that in exploring the concepts we’re
looking at here, giving the player an ability to involve themselves in those
kind of choices. That really is going to help to drive home the point.
You mentioned in the
Kickstarter, and I’m a fan of this genre, you mentioned one of the themes is
Steampunk. Does that mean the game itself will be taking place in a Victorian
era world or is OZ a place out of time with the rest of the world?
Well there is not going to be a persistent theme of
Steampunk it’s just that in some areas we’re going to discover that is the
primary theme. If you look at the “Alice: Madness Returns” game you see as you
move through that game the tone and style of particular areas within Alice’s
mind change depending on an overarching influence. There was sort of like an
Asian themed level as an example. That the same thing we’re going to apply
here. On the Asian note there is a China country in the world of OZ, there is
also the Silver Island underneath OZ that has an Asian them to it. As we move
between these areas we’re going to see the theme and art style of those areas
differs. Some of them it’ll be something that looks closer to Steampunk and
that’s really because Oz is a sort of an endpoint of a Bermuda triangle in the
sense that technology and people from our world can cross over into that world.
And so you can imagine that sort of like the island in Lost, you’re likely to
stumble on a wide variety of technology from various eras. The inhabitants of
Oz have likely adopted that stuff and made it into usable technology for
themselves.
Speaking of an
adaption, or figuring things out, you said in one of the updates that death is
unknown to the OZites and you touched on that a second ago when you said Baum
was inconsistent in whether death affects them or it doesn’t. Did the Scarecrow
then find a way to introduce death or is death merely a euphemism for something
else?
I can tell you that we’re definitely going to answer that
question but it’s sort of critical to one of the opening moments in the game and
I’d rather not sort of describe it just yet. I will tell you that we are going
to deal with that topic. I just don’t want to give it away too soon. It is one
of the more fun things in the Oz stories to play with and we’ll definitely
touch on that.
What led to the
decision to use Unity3D as the game engine as opposed to an in=house or other
licensed engine?
Well we don’t have an in-house engine, not one that would
support this complexity of game development. You know as a studio we’ve only
used two engines, one of them is Unreal 3 which we used for our first couple of
games. Now for the last two and a half years we’ve been using Unity
exclusively. It’s just an excellent tool set at a decent price. It’s the two
things you care about when you’re a small, independent developer. It makes it
where we’re able to generate lots of content very quickly, get that content to
a wide variety of platforms with a push of a button and it doesn’t break the
bank. It’s sort of everything we need wrapped up into one.
It was mentioned that
was going to be turn-based combat and role-play elements as well as action
adventure?
We don’t want to get too much into these details because of
course we’d like for those definitions to really take shape as we go the
preproduction and design phase on the product. But you know when you think of
the combat for instance, one of the reasons I mentioned looking at a turn based
system is that if you read people’s feedback about the Alice games you’ll see
that one of the things that was kind of most commented on as being difficult or
not engaging as the rest of the product was the combat. So the idea here would
be to find a combat system that’s suitable to a wider range of players and also
that is more streamlined. If you can engage with and get out of more quickly so
that is where the idea of a turn based combat system comes from. But again, you
know we’re not final in making that decision.
Going back to talking
about being a smaller developer, you’ve kind of been on both ends of the
developing spectrum, from the huge triple-AAA studio to the smaller,
independent studio. What have you discovered making the transition from making
large triple-AAA to being a smaller independent developer?
Well we as a small indie we’ve also worked on a large
Triple-AAA title so there was a point where our studio here got up to around 80
people when we were working on Alice: Madness Returns. These days we’re back
down to around 50 where only about 40 of those people are in a core development
team. I think that one of the big differences for us these days is that the
project size is a lot smaller and the budgets are a lot smaller. There is a lot
more happening, more quickly, than in a large console game. Alice took us two
years to build the game and took another, prior to that, year and a half to get
the deal done so that we could make the game. So you’re looking at sort of
spending four years of your life pursuing a project and developing it and
releasing it, and having only two weeks for it to monetize. That is about how
long a big console title like that lasts in the market before the pirates get a
hold of it. Where we are today we are able to turn around new games and launch
them in much shorter periods of time. We’ve got a studio where there are fewer
people we’re working on two or three projects at the same time instead of
everyone on the studio on one big project. So it’s just to me that there is a
lot more going on where we’re much more agile and there is a lot more
interesting problems to be solve don a daily basis. For me I prefer but at the
same time I wouldn’t say I wouldn’t go back to doing a large console game if
the right opportunity came along.
What other universes
have you considered playing around in or creating new franchise out of? Or is
there one in particular you’ve always wanted to do?
You know there are dozens of games concepts sitting in a
folder on our network drive that some of them are ideas I’ve come up with, some
of them are ideas others in our studio have come up with. We’ve got a pretty
wide range of content we’d like to develop but there are a lot of things that
go into deciding what we would work on. One of those is audience expectation or
demand. There is a sort of gravitation to projects that we know will appeal to
the audience that played our previous projects so that often can dictate the
fact for instance we might do another children’s fairytale themed game. But if
you look at the range of titles we’ve explored we’ve demos for racing games
that are set in China, we’ve got first person shooters that are set in outer
space, one idea that I’ve been playing with recently is sort of a serial killer
simulator. If you can image sort of like Dexter but as a game where you’re
offing people but trying not to get caught. There are a lot of ideas that you
explore but you know we only get to choose one to jump on.
Being a smaller game
developer located in Shanghai, what is it like being a developer in Shanghai
and was there much of a culture shock setting up Spicy Horse?
Being a game developer here is I think is pretty much like
being a game developer anywhere in the world because you’re using the same
skill sets, you require the same professionals to take care of our technology.
You’re often using the same engine; a lot of the developers in the world are
using Unity these days. Even our production practices we’re using SCRUM or some
sort of Agile technique. You’re going to see that wherever you happen to be
making games you’re generally following fairly similar patterns. Yeah I mean of
course there are cultural differences, it is China right? It’s like the other
side of the world for most people’s imagination. Even then the reality is that
nowhere in the world is really as far away as you imagine that it is. People in
China are still people going about their lives, making their business, and
trying to get by. I guess probably the biggest thing is language difference and
some cultural expectations that are different. It’s nothing that you can’t
overcome by immersing yourself in the cultures.
Speaking of
interesting cultures, the gaming culture itself, you’ve come from a long line
of gaming. Having worked in some of the largest gaming publishers, what have
your previous efforts in the gaming industry taught you that you’re
implementing in OZombie or in any of your other projects?
That’s a good question. I think that one thing I’ve learned
that I know is to admit how little I know. Things are changing so rapidly in
our industry that you know, something you took to be gospel yesterday is going
to be gone tomorrow right? That a platform you were beholden to or that sort of
was your core business yesterday is going to vanish tomorrow and a new one is
going to take its place. The same thing with game genres, the same thing with
customer expectation and tastes. So I think the thing that after 20 years I’ve
learned is that it really doesn’t pay to hold to your expectations or lessons
about the industry because everything is always changing so rapidly.
Speaking of rapid
change we’ve seen the rapid rise of Kickstarter for crowd funding different
projects especially video games. I know you’ve already done a Kickstarter for,
and I know I’m going to butcher the name, Akaneiro: Demon Hunters. What has
been the most positive and most negative aspects of attempting to do crowd
funding and do you feel it limits or expands your creative options?
Well I’ll answer the second part of the question first by
saying it absolutely expands our creative options. I think a lot times when I
see people commenting on the fact that we’re using Kickstarter they will ask
why a game designer with a known name, and I think they’re assuming that I’m
well off, they want to know why it is I’m using this sort of crowd funding
platform exclusively geared towards the grungy independent. The thing they’re
forgetting or not aware of, there are no other sources of money for development
in our industry. They’ll say “Why don’t they go to an investor?”
Investors don’t give money to support the production of original ideas/games.
Investors put money into businesses that are already generating a revenue
because they expect to get a return immediately on that investment. Game
publishers are putting money into fewer and fewer projects and putting larger
budgets into those projects as we go into this console transition. They’re also
not taking a lot of bets on new IPs because that’s incredibly risky and even
more expensive to launch new IP. Why do think we’re seeing Grand theft Auto 5
coming out now? So there are really no other sources of financing out there for
us. We can’t go to publishers, we can’t go to investors, and I don’t have
pockets deep enough at all to be funding a million plus dollars to get a new
game made. So yeah, it definitely opens up the possibilities for us.
On the first two questions, what’s the most positive and
most negative, certainly the most positive is the interaction that we’re getting
with the audience and the support we’re getting with the audience. It’s really
wonderful to have several thousand people engaged with your campaign and
provide feedback on all aspects of the campaign and the game itself. I love
that and I think it’s absolutely wonderful. The most negative is also sort of
related in the feedback we get and almost always it’s related to how the press
is handling the concept of Kickstarter. It seems that for some reason of late
the press has taken it upon themselves to sort of become the defenders of
justice on behalf of their audience and so they are very quick to slant an
article or present a piece of news as sort of an “us versus them” as
a “gamers versus evil publishers” or “gamers versus scammy
Kickstarter” or “gamers versus fill in the blank.” I think this
is doing a huge disservice to everyone that’s either employed by or taking
enjoyment from the industry because there really isn’t an “us versus
them” story. Yet this is what is emerging more and more on these various
gaming news websites where these journalists are forgetting that the first sort
of core pillar of journalism is to “first do no harm” and instead
they are seeking out and trying to find a way to make, to put damage into the
story.
I think this is detrimental to our industry because it is
limiting creativity and stifling innovation. That means that as an industry and
as an art form we’re not going to advance. If the media takes it upon
themselves to turn independent developers, new forms of monetization, or new
ways for developers to finance their games into the bad guy that means you’re
only ever going to get more “me too” products, more of the same,
instead of people taking risks and trying to innovate. The media seems to be
ignoring the fact that risks, that is where innovation comes from. Risk comes
with the possibility of failure and instead of pointing a finger at failure and
labeling it as someone trying to take advantage of a customer or someone trying
to scam or someone not knowing what they’re doing. It would be a lot more
healthy if like other industries we embraced the failures, learned from it and
improved the industry by virtue of learning from what went wrong. Instead the
media in the games industry seems to take a scorched earth approach to this,
that any transgression, any mistake and that whomever made that mistake ought
to be completely leveled. They oughta never have a chance to work or speak
again. Again I think that is completely damaging.
I was reading that
you’re trying to get the movie rights for Alice as a separate Kickstarter.
Assuming you are able to get the Kickstarter funded for Alice, what are we
looking at? Honestly I love the universe, I’d love to see something either
animated or otherwise done in an episodic format for Alice.
Well the backstory is that years ago before the first Alice
was ever released as a game, some producers from Hollywood came up to Redwood
Shores and bought the film rights from EA. I think at that point EA didn’t have
a sense of the value, the potential value, of the Alice IP, of the franchise.
So they sold off these rights and for the last twelve plus years these guys
down in Hollywood have sat on the rights and nothing happened. Just recently
they came to me and they said “We’re willing to sell these to you before
we take them out to the wider market and so would you be interested?” So
we structured a deal where I have a limited amount of time to get my hands on
these before they take them to an open market sale. If we do get the rights
then what we’re looking at immediately is doing a series of shorter animations
based on the Otherlands concept. That is basically Alice traveling into the
minds of a variety of characters that were in London at the time that this is
all taking place. So you’ve probably seen a list but its everyone from Edison
to Van Gogh to you name it. There is just a huge list of very interesting
characters there, such as Jules Verne. The basic idea is to use that license to
explore those minds with Alice as the vehicle. Beyond that the rights allow us
to make a feature film that can be live action or animated. That is something
that I’m already talking with interested writers and directors about getting
that project going. Again, the first part of this is getting our hands on
ownership of these rights.
That is awesome. I
really enjoyed the Alice universe. I’ve got the games and just really the style
you did for the games, the kind of gothic-noir, the dark gothic, I like that
style of universe. Besides the Alice games, what other games have you
considered revisiting again? You’ve also got Scrapland, Grimm, and others. Have
you considered revisiting any of them anytime soon or is that off the table for
more newer projects.
You know I think going forward we’re going to be mainly
focused on trying to do things with Oz, do things with current library of IP we
have like Akaneiro. I don’t know that we’re going to have a chance to revisit
any of those old projects. You know opportunity is a strange thing. I could say
that today and then tomorrow a publisher or financier could call up and say
“We want to give you money to bring Grimm back to life.” So if that
opportunity came along we wouldn’t pass that up.
Now with Grimm you
did that in an episodic format using GameTap. Episodic games have, with the exception
of some TellTale games, have fallen by the wayside. Do you have any idea why
the episodic format didn’t really take off or is it something that, at the
time, was due to the technology?
I don’t think it’s a technological issue. I mean, if you
look at the Walking Dead, which is the recent most successful of the TellTale
games. It’s clear that they’ve spent many years sticking with the idea that
episodic storytelling in games, to learn all of the lessons and try to figure
out how to make the genre work, and now they’ve presented something that swept
all of the game of the year awards and really took everyone by surprise. It’s
not because it’s technologically advanced or that it’s using the latest engine
for 3D graphics or anything like that. It’s just that they’ve really found a
way to present a specific genre of game in a really satisfying, really sticky
way. So I think that they’ve sort of proven that the idea of episodic is good
one it just took some years of effort and risk and even failure to learn the
lessons towards making it the thing that it is today. Again that goes back to
this issue of an industry that doesn’t allow failure that doesn’t accept risk
or that doesn’t react appropriately.
What have you been
wanting to tell an interviewer or anybody that has come up to you and ask
questions, what’s the one thing that you’ve been wanting to tell people that
hasn’t been asked? That is kind of something you’ve wanted known that just
hasn’t been said?
I think on this question of things I’d like people to know,
you know recently I’ve really started to grow tired of the negativity that I
see leveled at me as an individual designer and people’s sort of perception of
who I am based on what I guess they’ve read online or the products I’ve made.
More and more I wish people would spend a little time to understand that I’m
just a person just like everyone else. I live a very humble life and I’m just
trying to make my business go and make games which is the thing that I enjoy
doing. I do wish that as an industry this, you know, this online bullying,
antagonism, and negativity that people could start to get a grasp of it and try
to control it a bit. Again I feel like this is you know, personal attacks on
people like myself or attacks on platforms like Kickstarter, or attacks on
developers or attacks on different models of publishing that is becoming an
incredibly toxic time and place for us as an industry. It really just makes me
feel like it’s going to stifle creativity; it’s going to stifle innovation. I
think if anything that’s the main thing, I just wish people would just kind of
back up and take a kind of more human look at what it is we’re doing as a
culture and as a group.
The last question is
a bit of a two parter. When are we looking at OZombie being released? I know
you have the four finalists for the new name for OZombie as well, when will we
know which name has been chosen?
As for a release date it’s going to have to be at least a
year after the successful funding of the product so we’re looking at starting
production late 2013, we would be delivering a closed beta around late 2014. As
far as the name goes, I don’t want to comment on that just yet as I have not
had a chance yet to go through and do a proper count of the feedback. We really
want to let it be that the final decision is made by the audience and so as
soon as we get a sense of what they’re voting for we’ll post that online.
I really do like how
agile you’ve been with the project so far and and the fact you’ve been willing
to change whatever you’ve needed to to reach out and go with what the fans have
wanted. I think you very much for the interview and I really appreciate you
taking your time to speak with me.
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