American McGee's Scrapland demo

Nothing really. The whole thing comes from the Romero/Daikatana era when publishers thought they could rock star developers up 50%. Alice was good, but he’s not in the Sid Meier category. He says that it was EA’s idea to put his name in the title, but I doubt he fought it much.

Behold.

http://www.cdmag.com/articles/029/024/alice_feature.html

McGee sounds a little embarrassed that the game is being called American McGee’s Alice, but he says it’s for trademark reasons. Since Lewis Carroll’s work is public domain, Electronic Arts needs some way to give this interpretation of the Carroll world a unique and legally defensible brand name. Hence, American McGee’s Alice.

That doesn’t explain why they used his name to do iit. They could have set the game apart from the Caroll books by giving it any other title with “Alice” in it.

Will Wright
Tetsuya Miziguchi (Rez, Space Channel 5, Sega Rally)
Toshihiro Nagoshi (Monkey Ball, FZero GX, Daytona)
Yoot Saito (Seaman, Odama)

-Scott-

As DaveC mentioned, it coincided with the brief time period where studios and publications were really trying to pump up the people behind the games. Since he has such an interesting name I can see why EA tried the tactic. If it had suceeded it would be a great way of branding without the brand being tied to a specific franchise or genre.

Allen Adham (not that most people know who he is, but I think he’s deserving)

Name’s aside, this seems like an okay PC version of a poor man’s Beyond Good & Evil.

The character swap dynamic is okay I guess, but it’s nothing to write home about, and the main character looks like a puppet that escaped from a crappy Christian television show for kids.

I’m not sure why I’d play it.

Shigeru Miyamoto.