GIGnews: A Chat with American McGee

May 2003

A CHAT WITH AMERICAN MCGEE

GIGnews recruited Melanie Cambron, known by most in the industry as The Game Recruiting Goddess, to use her skills for the good of gamekind and recruit some of the big names in the industry to give us all valuable insight into what they do and how they do it.

There are very few "above the title" names in the game industry. American McGee is the obvious exception to the rule. In December 2000 when Electronic Arts released American McGee’s Alice, a darkly gothic version of the Lewis Carroll tales (Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass), a star was born. American was selected by PC Gamer as one of the future "Game Gods", listed in the Rolling Stone "Hot" list as "Hot Game Designer" and was ranked #40 in the Gear Magazine "100 Most Exciting People, Places, Things" issue.

But like every great star story, success did not happen overnight. American began his career in the interactive industry when he was hired away from a promising career as an auto mechanic at the age of 20 by then next-door neighbor John Carmack's industry giant, id Software. Within three months he was promoted to level designer and during his four plus years at id, he engaged in virtually every aspect of game creation. He helped mold the 1st/3rd person shooter genre as it is known today and contributed to a variety of enormously popular games that helped revolutionize the industry including the Doom and Quake series of games. In 1998, McGee was offered a position at Electronic Arts in its Maxis division, where he consulted on a variety of games including The Sims before he began development of American McGee's Alice for EA. During this time McGee also consulted on a number of major PC and console titles and, after completing Alice he took a short sabbatical before leaving Electronic Arts.

Today, American resides in Los Angeles and is creative director/founder of Carbon6 Entertainment. His current game projects include American McGee's Oz as well as several other unannounced titles. In his spare time he works as a music video/TV commercial director with Squeak Pictures.

MC: Some friends recently had a debate about the effect of "normalizing" on modern fiction. That is, with psychotherapy becoming ever more commonplace and all these readily available drugs to more or less take away the edge, will there ever be another Poe or Hemingway? I don’t know that we’re quite yet a nation of shiny, happy people, but sometimes it feels we’re headed that way. As a person who has said that much of your inspiration comes from "dark things" do you find the rise of a "prozac nation" a little scary?

AM: I think the normalization is real but localized. It’s more a function of a marketing and media driven national consciousness, which is less and less likely to try thinking outside the box, than of Prozac and psychotherapy. For all our cowboy independence and hard core individualism it seems to me that we’re one of the most "white bread" nations in the world. Normality is taught to us from the moment we first open our eyes and being different in dress, thought, opinion is considered a bad thing; an idea constantly reinforced by the media (entertainment and press). But like all things it’s a cycle that will swing back (probably violently) as people lash out to un-brand themselves. Even if it never again balances out…the brighter the light the deeper the shadows.

MC: Author Joyce Carol Oates has written the following: "No work of art so thrills us, or possesses the power to enter our souls deeply and perhaps even irreversibly, as the ‘first’ of its kind. The luminous books of our childhood will remain the luminous books of our lives. For me, it was Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass…" Her grandmother had given her the books when Oates was 8 and, she says, almost as fascinating as the tales themselves, "was the dreamlike cover showing Alice amid the comical-grotesque Carroll creations that, to an adult eye, bear a disturbing kinship with the comical-grotesque creations of Hieronymus Bosch." Is there a work of art that similarly affected you?

AM: Lawrence of Arabia. The reason is summed up in a quote from T.E. Lawrence: "All men dream - but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men - for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did."

MC: As someone who got into the industry in a somewhat roundabout way, I was curious as to your opinion on the increasing number of schools offering degrees in game design. As quick background for those who don’t know, around the time you were working as an auto mechanic, you became neighbors and then friends with John Carmack who gave you a tech support job and the rest, as they say, is history. Is game design something that can be taught or is that sort of creativity more innate or, for that matter, borne from life experiences?

AM: I think that games, like film, move forward so quickly in terms of technology, mechanics, and production methodology that school courses are going to have a hard time teaching the "‘in the trenches" lessons unless they find a way to incorporate actual production into their curriculum. Film schools do this through student film projects, game design schools would do well to follow suit (I actually visited one in Hong Kong that has begun to do this with much success).

Ultimately, game design, like all skills, can be taught but that doesn’t mean that every student is going to turn into a Beethoven. Creativity is innate. Marketable creativity is not. "Genius" in a particular field is usually more a function of extreme focus and hard work on the part of an individual than anything else.

MC: Text books aside, are there any books, in particular, that you believe are "must reads" for game inspiration? For example, Richard Garriott, among others, has mentioned Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth as a source of inspiration. One of the many things Bruce Shelley said he learned working with Sid Meier is to do a lot of your basic research in the children’s section of the library. Are there any books, in particular, that you believe are "must reads" for game inspiration?

AM: Inspiration flows from a wide range of topics: writing, art appreciation, filmmaking, interior design, psychology, sci-fi, etc. It would be difficult for me to narrow down to just one book.

MC: I want to talk music for a moment. While at id, you served as the music manager and your friendships with Trent Reznor and Marilyn Manson are fairly legendary in the industry. And through Squeak Pictures you do music videos. First, what was the very first record you recall buying and what was it about that album or song that moved you to do so? And, more to the game industry point, how does music have an impact on your game design? Do you have songs in mind when designing?

AM: Not sure what the first record was, but I know that U2’s Joshua Tree was the first CD. Initially I was probably drawn to their MTV image and the package artwork. To this day it remains one of my favorites though because of the excellent music and production. As for music’s impact on design, for me it’s huge. As the first bits of an idea begin to form in my head I gather music that inspires and supports the tone of the project. With Oz I was able to hand our composer, Geoff Zanalli, a CD full of music that helped him to understand my vision of the soundtrack. The same was done with Alice and it worked out very well.

MC: In an interview a year or so ago you discussed Alice and whether there was pressure on you from EA to make it less dark or more dark or some level of dark that would generate more sales. In response, you said that "it came down to whether or not it felt like we were doing something true to the work more than, ‘how are we going to make a lot of sales?’" When I hear artists say that I always wonder, do they really mean it? As a person with his own company, Carbon6 Entertainment, surely there must be some consideration as to sales. How do you balance the aesthetic with the financial?

AM: Balancing commerce and art is an age-old argument that will find no final answer in my hands. I do my best to deliver "art" in the form of high quality assets while at the same time recognizing the conventions of a commercial product necessary to continue the flow of food to my table. Each facet of a project taken on its own is undeniably art: the music, the textures on the walls, the animations, even the code. But you make games for your audience and you stay true to the material if you’re adapting someone else’s work for your game.

MC: In my interviews I like to focus more on the person and the big picture versus specific games, but I can’t get away with not asking you about Oz – sort of. In 1900, L. Frank Baum, when describing his book, The Wizard of Oz, likened it to a "modernized fairy tale" in which "the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale…It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out." So, will you be putting the nightmares back in?

AM: When I encountered that passage while doing research on Oz I cringed and thought, "I’m going to have to leave this one alone." Fortunately I read through a couple of pages and came to a section where the tin man lops the head off a wolf and sends blood spraying into the air. Plenty more nightmares followed and I realized that, like Alice, Oz is already a dark place simply looking for someone to interpret it the right way.

MC: Other than the release of Oz, of course, what do you see as the next big development in the games industry? Do you foresee any particular trends?

AM: I believe that with the next generation consoles becoming "everything" machines (Tivo, game consoles, DVD, MP3, email, etc) we’re going see games change in several major ways: format, funding, delivery, replay-ability, and integration. Formats of games will go from where we are now with "feature length" only, to music video, TV commercial, serial, and other formats of content. Funding for titles will begin to flow from a source other than game publishers as record labels, ad agencies, and corporations realize that the majority of the market they are trying to reach is playing video games and spending less time with traditional media outlets. Delivery will shift as next-gen consoles arrive broadband ready and new games can be "Tivo’d" just like we’re doing with TV content right now. The above distribution model will also affect replay-ability, as new content will be streamed into games in the form of advertising and new game characters, storylines, etc. All of these combined will create a sort of media integration that will allow, for instance, hybrid music video/video game products which consumers can watch in a linear fashion or choose to jump into and interact with as a character in the world. Further out I see these changes leading to production companies that combine the game production abilities of a company like EA with the linear entertainment abilities of one like Pixar. That, by the way, is going to be a very cool company.

MC: If you could narrow your success down to three key elements, what would they be?

AM: Perseverance, imagination, and being surrounded by people smarter than myself.

MC: Finally, we were both raised in Dallas. And I, like you, have also left. However, I still feel compelled to ask you at least a variation on my "best Mexican food restaurant" question that I typically ask of fellow Texans. In all honesty, who has better Mexican food? Los Angeles or Dallas?

AM: Dallas doesn’t really have Mexican food. They have Tex-Mex which in many ways is better than any food I’ve ever come across in the world. Los Angeles certainly has the best authentic Mexican food though.

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AUTHOR BIO
Melanie Cambron is a recruiter for game industry leaders such as THQ, Midway, and Infogrames. Featured in Game Design: Secrets of the Sages and Secrets of the Game Business for her game industry knowledge, she also wrote the foreword to the successful book, Game Programming with Direct X 7.0 and its follow-up. Melanie speaks each semester at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of North Texas on the game development industry, and is frequently interviewed by major media such as the Dallas Morning News for her industry expertise. She also serves as a consultant to the City of Austin's Interactive Industry Development Committee. Learn more about the "Game Recruiting Goddess" at www.melaniecambron.com or contact her directly at melanie@melaniecambron.com

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