American McGee Talks About Grimm

Posted June 4, 2007 by Kevin

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For someone who started out as a level designer at id Software, American McGee has come a long way. His first official game, Alice, turned a lot of heads, and was ultimately picked up by Universal Pictures for a film adaptation starring Sarah Michelle Gellar in the lead role. After a couple flops with Scrapland and Bad Day L.A., McGee has returned to his roots of making games set in darker versions of fairy tale settings.

Alice has to be one of the most unique games of it’s time - the art style was totally bizarre in a Tim Burton sort of way, and the gameplay and story only reinforced the dark theme. So I was excited to find out what his newest project, Grimm, was all about. In a recent interview with Tale of Tales, McGee discussed some of the specifics of his new game:

You tend to refer to some of your work as “twisted fairy tales”. In “American McGee’s Alice”, you turned Lewis Caroll’s naive heroine into a murdering psychopath. The title of your new project, “American McGee’s Grimm”, obviously refers to the Grimm brothers who, in the early 19th century, collected traditional fairy tales and cleaned them up to make them suitable for children. Will you be looking beyond the Grimm brothers for the often disturbing older versions of these stories? Or do you intend to put a new “twist” on the Grimms’ clean versions?

Our goal is to put the teeth back into the collection of tales commonly referred to as “Grimm’s”. There are older, darker versions of these stories which gruesomely illustrate the fate awaiting those who choose not to heed their lessons. In fact, our initial “twist” is to remove ALL darkness from these tales. We then allow the player to bring the tale back to its darkest form. How dark is left to the player, but a “minimum dark” is required to finish each mission.

“American McGee’s Grimm” will be released in 24 episodes. That strikes me as especially ambitious! Will the episodes be self contained or will the whole series form one continuous story? How long will the project take? How frequently will the episodes be released?

Episodes are planned to be self-contained and independently downloadable and playable. The idea is to create a TV series feel - small, predictable chunks of entertainment for the masses. Each episode will weigh in around :30 minutes.

We’re not talking about delivery schedule specifics yet - but the idea is to get as close to the TV episodic model as possible. I don’t think we’ll fully understand the potential of episodic gaming until that’s done. Our production will take 24 months, but we’ll be delivering our first episodes around halfway into production.

Keep your eye one this one - it should turn out pretty interesting to see if a guy who describes himself as “I want to be the next Walt Disney, only a little more wicked” can make the episodic content model work for gaming.

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