The exciting, if not slightly warped world that churns inside the head of American McGee has been very busy as of late. The developer who brought PC owners a dark and frightening version of Alice’s Looking Glass World in American McGee’s Alice not only has sold the rights to make a movie, but has another game in the oven. First and probably most anticipated is the upcoming film adaptation of his Alice. Second is the further development of his new re-imagining project, American McGee’s Grimm.

Sarah Michelle-Gellar of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Grudge and not much else of note is confirmed for the Alice project. Comments made after reading the article from Sci-Fi Wire makes McGee seem unaware of what is going on with the project. In his blog he says, “Truth is, I don’t know much more than the rest of you. And there are even a few details in this article that are news to me. The article makes it sound like Gellar now ‘owns’ the Alice film rights - something I didn’t know.” To quell his own fears he goes on to state that ”the article describes ‘Alice’ as a ‘1st-person-shooter’ - so it might turn out that these are just misunderstandings.”

Film plans aside; the excitement that McGee fans feel every time he updates his blog is palpable. The game maker has been regularly releasing preliminary character and world designs for the upcoming American McGee’s Grimm based off of fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm. The game which is being hosted by GameTap and developed by McGee’s China based Spicy Horse is planned to be released exclusively for PC.

Despite PC plans, the recently confirmed use of the Unreal Engine in the game raises some eyebrows. The engine has been wildly successful and used faithfully in many next-gen console releases. Perhaps a future port of Grimm is in the works to the PS3 or the Xbox 360. I certainly hope this is the case because my computer is about as useful as if a hamster in a wheel was powering it, if only I had a hamster.

McGee’s blog is updated regularly with concept art and news about the two projects. The blog is very interesting to read if not to learn more about McGee, then just to see some warped pictures of headless bunnies.

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