American McGee

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American McGee (born December 13, 1972) is an American game designer.

McGee began his career at id Software. He was a level designer for such games as Doom II, Quake, and Quake II. In 1998, he moved to Electronic Arts, where he worked as a consultant on many projects and also created his own game, American McGee's Alice. After finishing Alice, he left Electronic Arts and founded his own company, The Mauretania Import Export Company, of which he is the president.

McGee later produced the game Scrapland and projects in the works include American McGee's Oz and American McGee's Grimm. His latest production is Bad Day L.A. . Production of the Oz game has been put on hold, which McGee attributes to a lack of interest at game publishing houses in new ideas and products without established market names. In order to get a publisher, McGee has decided to sell the game as a film before actually finishing it. He was recently set to write the script for the Oz films, which is said to be a trilogy that will be produced by Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer. Oz is only in the development stage and no official announcements have been made regarding the films. McGee spearheaded an attempt to launch a film adaptation of his Alice game, but the project collapsed and fell into obscurity for several years. It was finally picked up by Universal Pictures and is set to be released as Alice in 2007. While McGee has had no control of Alice and only limited control of Oz, he expects to exercise more control over Grimm, which is still in the conceptual stages of development.

His stated mission is "to create a unified production method for story telling across the interactive and film industries" and of himself, he says, "I want to be the next Walt Disney, only a little more wicked."

Upon inquiry about his unusual name: "My mom smoked pot. She was a hippie. I'm not sure how else to put that." On his website, American had this to say of the matter: "She claims a woman she knew in college, who named her daughter 'America', inspired the name. She also tells me that she was thinking of naming me 'Obnard'. She was and always has been a very eccentric and creative person." He has also stated that there is only one other person in the world named "American" and "he was named after me."