Shacknews Sits Down With American McGee

Shacknews.com recently interviewed famed game developer American McGee and quizzed him on details about upcoming projects.

The creator of the critically-acclaimed PC title Alice has already announced his studio is working on a new title also rooted in fairy tales, Grimm, to be sold via Gametap.

In the interview, he said the upcoming title would be driven by a "high-end, off-the-shelf 3D engine," and that Alice writer R.J. Berg is on board this time around, as well.

McGee also delved into some of the more novel aspects of gameplay in Grimm:

American McGee: In keeping with the literary theme of our source material, all aspects of the game--including the weapons system--derive from the building blocks of fairy tales and the books containing them. The Words as Weapons concept is elegantly simple--our main character can pluck action verbs like "BURN" from the game environment, carry them around, and hurl them at enemies and obstacles. Word weapon effects are full of variety yet are visually self-evident, an aspect which I think makes the concept ideal for episodic games.

The developer also talked about episodic content, hypothesized about co-producing a game with Sid Meier, discussed the termination of the planned title Oz and poked fun at his own name.