Look, it may be a great game, which is why I was anxious to post this sale price, but if you read an interview with American McGee, you quickly come to conclusion that this is a supremely smug gen-X-er who really needs to get his ass kicked. As far as I know, his sole claim to fame before this game was being one of several level designers for Id, before he was fired.
As Daily Radar delicately pointed out, "The level designers and music makers, we assume with American's help, have created a version of Wonderland true to the game's story." Meaning, he was just one "programmer" (if level design=programming) on a large team.
I'll leave it to Old Man Murrary to give you the
true American McGee:
"Today he published an interview with American McGee in which they discuss American McGee's "American McGee's Alice". Redwood starts with an easy question whose answer is seemingly obvious, "How did you first come up with the idea behind Alice?" McGee begins to ramble and in the process manages to mention Doom, Doom 2, Quake, the freeway, American McGee, the band Crystal Method, his other big idea "a game where you fought bugs from the future", and Quake 2. After a few hundred words, he stops. You can't tell from the way the interview is written, but I imagine there was a thirty or forty second pause while Redwood waited for him to catch his breath and say something about Lewis Carroll. At the point where it must have become uncomfortably clear that McGee was done answering, Redwood says for him:
Obviously the original Lewis Carroll stories (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass) were your basic source for Alice...
Which reminds McGee to thank Tim Burton and Edward Gorey. I gotta give Redwood credit, that was a classy way to inject an editorial jab into the interview."
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I don't have a problem with someone reinterpreting a literary classic, but let's keep perspective here--the title is akin to "Levelord's Romeo and Juliet" or "Stevie Case's A Paradise Lost." :Q