American McGee to produce Scrapland
Set in a futuristic world teeming with sentient robots who aren't too fond of humans, Scrapland is being billed as a quirky action game. Players will assume the role of D-Tritus, a cybernetic wanderer who gets mixed up in a series of murders on a planet whose inhabitants had, until recently, been thought of as immortal. Using his abilities to transform into 15 types of characters, D-Tritus scours the city of Chimera to solve the murders.[via GameSpot]
It is great to see a McGee title slated for 2004 release, but I am still holding out hope that Oz will find a publisher. GameSpot asked McGee in January why the publishers were not biting (Atari and McGee had a brief fling that involved a few expensive dates, but eventually McGee got the "it's not you" speech), despite the fact Jerry Bruckheimer had optioned the film rights for a possible trilogy based on the game title.
AM: Truth is that game publishers aren't buying original game ideas these days. They want either a sequel to an existing successful game or a piece of Hollywood IP (intellectual property) with someone else's marketing dollars behind it. "Presold awareness" as they call it. Personally, I think that's a nice euphemism for "We're publicly traded and only go after the safe bets." Our goal has been to skirt around that issue by getting our ideas made into films, toys, books, and other products and then going back to game publishers to get the game made. From what I can tell, it's the only way to get them to do an original idea these days.[via GameSpot]
