Back-stabbing, player-hating, two-timing, cris-crossing....

Look at the music industry: that has become so cutthroat that a performer, even one who has a successful record behind them or happens to be amazing live, is merely one step (or dud single) away from being dropped from his / her label. Business is so intense that very view performers can survive a really bad album (or worse, one that doesn’t sell. If it’s bad but shifts big units then we have no problem there!) – only that select group of super-superstars (i.e. the Madonnas and Mariah Careys of this world). You can all think of those who come out in a blaze of glory and then slunk away a few weeks / years / months later: Vanilla Ice, Stephen Gateley etc. That is the music industry and it is so full of perceived talent that hiring in firing is just the way of the world.

But computer gaming is different, surely; you have little development teams beavering away at their own pet projects until they are completed, at which point some nice publisher will press it onto disk and it will appear in shops. Well, you will know from some previous columns that this is not the real picture: for a start hardly any game is “finished” to the standard the original plan envisioned when it goes into stores. However, something emerged recently that even surprised many hardened games journalists with its abruptness and seriousness, and it gives us a chance to see just how dangerous the industry is become and how, for every Valve or ID Software one developer will crash and burn.

If you played Quake – and were thus forced to look at the credits every time you shut the game down – you will have at least seen the name of American McGee. He was an integral part of the Quake team who ultimately left ID (bad move, bro) to pursue his own, slightly warped, ideas and fell in with Barrett Alexander of Rogue Software. Ultimately the two came together and American (is that his real name??) started to work on his version of Alice in Wonderland. Intrigued by this, EA signed on as publisher and the game sucked in quite a lot of Rogue’s money on the way to release on both PlayStation 2 and PC, at which point it would receive critical acclaim and sell millions thereby setting Rogue up for good. At least, that was how things were meant to play – instead, things went wrong in a hurry. The friendship between publisher and developer went sour in a hurry, and things worsened when the final PC version of Alice hit EA’s doormat. While they did not expect a straight storybook conversion a source at EA says “we did expect something which would be suitable for children to play”. Sorry, kiddos: American McGee’s Alice (as it was called) was like the (already plenty weird) Alice remixed by the Dust Brothers in a world with no happiness while their skin dissolved as acid rain fell. It featured a “gratuitous” (PC Gamer UK) scene in which Alice is seen with slashed wrists – and quite frankly scared the heel out of everyone. The reviewers (it did not harvest bad scores, but they were hardly stunning). The buying public. And, most consequentially, the head honchos at EA. After this bomb they cancelled the PS2 versions quickly, citing spiralling development costs, poor PC sales and the need to return money to investors (although the same EA source said “they were scrambling to bail out of PS2 as that ship went down”). This left Rogue in a rather sticky situation…

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