Over months of interviews and research, I got to know the names behind the credits screens on each Quake game. These developer profiles offer snapshots of our conversations that extend beyond discussion of id Software's culture and the Quake franchise.

Before American McGee became a brand, he was just a normal guy. A normal guy who landed his dream job at 21 years old and got to contribute design ideas to computer software that set the direction of the games industry for the next two decades and counting.

As if working for id Software wasn't cool enough, part of his job required him to travel to New Orleans and hang out with rock stars.

McGee is the first to admit that his tenure at id Software was not always pleasant. He'll also readily admit that he has few regrets, if any. If it wasn't for Doom and Quake, he may never have seen his name stamped on game boxes, met and worked with famed novelist Michael Crichton, or bummed cigarettes off David Bowie backstage at a Nine Inch Nails concert. We talked about those subjects, as well as the kinship he developed with Trent Reznor and Will Wright, how Electronic Arts transformed his name into a global brand, and the fortuitous sequence of events that enabled him to develop his Grimm episodic series of fairytale-themed adventures.

American McGee at id Software.

Craddock: How did you meet Trent Reznor and the rest of Nine Inch Nails?

American McGee: When we worked in Mesquite, Texas, we got a fax that said the band was going to be in town, and [an invitation] to come to the show. John Carmack and I were big fans of Nine Inch Nails and we went to the show, but I stuck around for the after-party backstage and met Trent [Reznor]. I think John was backstage that night as well. They also became friends, and I think they're still friends to this day.

Craddock: You mentioned to me that you spent a lot of time with the band. What was that like?

American McGee: It was a little surreal. It was already surreal to be working at id, especially at that time in their history. It was one of the top developers you could be working for. And then the opportunity to hang out, make sound effects, and watch these guys make music for the game was thrown into the mix. I was traveling to New Orleans quite often, which is where they had their studio at the time. It was in an old mortuary, a three-story, very long. It took up half a block in one direction and a full block in another. They had crammed their studio into it, so rooms filled with music equipment, and they'd be having jam sessions, working on either material for a new album, or stuff for the Quake game.

I ended up going out on the road with them quite a bit. I [celebrated] at least one New Year with them. I think that was in New York. I also got to know Marilyn Manson and the guys in his band. If you could imagine lots of late nights out, running around the streets of New Orleans and doing all things sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. I think there were parts of that that did spill over into normal life, that might have been a bit of a distraction from work from time to time. But I don't regret it now. I can look back and see that if I hadn't had all that fun and taken some of the opportunities I did, I would have regretted that.

I remember moments like being backstage at the concerts, where I was standing just off stage. Stage right, just behind the curtain, and being able to watch Nine Inch Nails on-stage doing their thing, and being so close to the action of it. I remember almost being hit by a flying drum or a flying guitar at one point. I had to duck as Trent threw some musical instrument off-stage and almost hit me with it. Going and exploring the swamps around the outskirts of New Orleans. Talking with Trent about games and life. I got to know him and his story quite well. It felt like he was a pretty inspirational figure. He's a self-made man. He'd gone from being a studio engineer to the lead of his own band.

Craddock: You ran with NIN during the Outside tour in late 1995. I believe that's when they were opening for David Bowie in New England. Did you get to meet him?

American McGee: I remember being backstage once, and asking a guy if I could bum a smoke. I realized I was asking David Bowie if I could bum a smoke. I ended up standing there talking with him for five minutes. I never got close with him, but he was out on tour with the band—either Nine Inch Nails was touring with David Bowie, or David Bowie was touring with Nine Inch Nails—but that was one of those weird little moments. You're a 21-year-old kid who's landed in a job where there's a million other people in the world who might be better at it than you are. And then on top of that, you're thrust into this weird life of rock-and-roll.

Craddock: What was Trent Reznor like when he wasn't performing?

American McGee: He's a really smart guy, first and foremost. He's a deeply intellectual and emotional person. I think that comes from a past that contained a fair amount of drama and pain. That shows up in his work. When I was spending time with him, I was seeing a side to relationships and adult life that I had never really been exposed to before. I think he was one of the first people to get inside of my head. He was one of the first people to tell me to stop walking around thinking my shit didn't stink.

At that age, I was pretty immature, as I imagine most 21-year-olds are. I got embroiled in a bit of drama when I ended up dating the girlfriend of a photographer. This was his girlfriend, and then she ended up jumping to me. That created a stir among the band members. I just remember him not lecturing me, but trying to talk me through the moral lessons of my behavior. It was interesting because this was coming from a person who, from the outside, you might think was living this rock-star life without morality. Yet there was. There was a lot of depth there. That was one of the things I found quite interesting: He went back and forth between someone who you felt like was potentially off the rails, and somebody who was putting on the act of somebody off the rails.

I got the same impression of [Marilyn] Manson. Manson is another one in that group: incredibly articulate, smart, well-read, and you feel at times, 'This [rock-star image] is all just an act.' Then at other times you see that the act takes over and isn't an act anymore. Both of them had that going on. It was interesting to be around people who were that complicated.

Craddock: You've talked about dropping out of high school because of trouble at home. Trent had a tumultuous childhood as well. Is it accurate to say you found a kindred spirit in him?

American McGee: I had that relationship with John [Carmack] as well. John is maybe a few years older than me, but if you know John Carmack's story, he also had a troubled childhood. He was reckless, and had some of the same things going on as Trent. I think I drew inspiration from both. I grew up without a father, so I never knew my [birth] father.

I had a series of stepdads, none of whom were all that great as far as male father figures or role models went. It was quite easy for me to latch on to men who projected an aura of having gotten through something and become successful, or at least become whole. That was definitely part of the relationship. I also had the sense, with Trent, that he had taken me under his wing. I felt quite honored to be in that position.

Writer and filmmaker Michael Crichton.

Craddock: After leaving id, you became known for your Alice game at EA. Was that your next job?

American McGee: The first job I took after id Software actually wasn't with EA. It was with Michael Crichton, the guy who created Jurassic Park. I had finished my time at id and I got a mysterious email that said, 'Would you like to come out to North Carolina and come out to see this project we'd like you to work on?' They wouldn't tell me anything about it. A plane ticket was sent. I flew out and ended up sitting in a room with Michael Crichton. Over the course of a year, I worked with him over the course of a year on this project called Timeline, which eventually became a game—that Eidos published—and a movie and a book.

He was another person who was an absolute creative genius and a very attractive individual: super rich, tall, handsome, very intelligent and articulate. That project was what got me into EA because it was Maxis, under EA, that was looking at managing and funding that production. It was a game developer out in North Carolina working on it, and EA was funding them. All of those interactions—spending a year with Crichton, spending my year at Maxis working with Will Wright—set a fire in my mind that here are people who use their minds to tell stories to entertain people, and who made me ask, 'How and in what way can the technology we're working with be leveraged to tell stories in ways that rival what Crichton does on the big screen?'

These things were a massive influence, and a massive inspiration as well. At all of these points, I would sometimes pinch myself and think, Am I really sitting in Michael Crichton's house talking about the next book he's writing and helping him come up with scene scenarios? How the fuck did this happen? That just seemed to be the path I was on at that point.

Craddock: What was Michael Crichton like?

American McGee: Very, very extroverted. Very self-assured. Very charming. He absolutely knew how to push people's buttons to get what he wanted in terms of asking people nicely to accomplish things he wanted to get done. He had a unique aura about him. At the time I was on the plane flying to go to meet him—I didn't know I would be meeting him—I happened to be reading his book, Travels. It was a midlife autobiography. I was really fascinated with him because I'd read all of his novels, and then my girlfriend at the time finished reading travels and said, 'Read this.' I was halfway through that book when I took the flight to North Carolina. When he walked into the room, I said, 'Is this a joke? You're the guy on the back of the book I'm reading.'

He was broadly read and experienced. He dabbled in religion, and obviously knew a great deal about science and medicine because he went through medical school. The thing he wasn't good at, though, was computer games. He had a history of being involved with or creating concepts for computer games that failed miserably. In the process of working with him, this was one of the big disconnects and frustrations on both sides of that relationship: The fact that he wanted to do things with games that people in the industry had trouble doing [at that time]. Telltale has done well with their episodic games, especially The Walking Dead. But at that time, the notion of storytelling, especially nonlinear storytelling, weaving that into a 3D environment in a seamless way—the technology wasn't there to make it happen. He was asking for the moon and was getting the parking lot outside of McDonald's.

American McGee's Alice.

Craddock: You went to Maxis with experience working on Doom and Quake. How did experience working on some of the most popular games of all time help you at your next job?

American McGee: To be honest, I think I came out of id quite limited in terms of skills that would be applicable in normal game development. We never wrote a design document. By the time I was given the opportunity to build the Alice game, that was the first time I'd ever sat down and had to design something. It was the first time I'd sat down and thought about story, level layout, and player progression. We never had done any of that. I was just a really fast and good level designer. I learned how to build maps and make sound effects, and write code, but I had to unlearn a lot. I had to learn a lot of new stuff in order to integrate [at other companies].

Working at id was like working in outer space, and then you have to come back down to earth and relearn how proper earthlings function. I remember on one of my first days at EA, the guy who had helped get me hired—his name is Richard Hilleman—he stood up in front of a board room full of people, 20 to 30 people who were managers and producers on projects. And he goes, 'I want to introduce you all to American McGee. He's come over from id Software, and he's going to show you how it's done!' I was like, 'No! Dude!'

But there was this sort of aura, this weirdness of, 'Oh, you're one of the guys who was at id.' I had to constantly disabuse people of their preconceived notions and tell them, 'No, I actually have no fucking clue what I'm doing.'

Will Wright and a Sim.

Craddock: The story about your friend introducing you has me wondering about the "American McGee" brand. Did it start there?

American McGee: The name-before-the-title thing was weird, and at the time quite distressing for me as well. We built Alice, and because it was based on public-domain property, EA's legal team came back and said, 'We're having a really difficult time establishing a strong name for this.' Almost every kind of variation you can imagine had been squatted on: Alice in Nightmare Land, Alice in Wonderful Land.'

People had done a million variations: as comic books, TV shows, animations, you name it. There was also concern about Disney and the other bigger players out there who operated in the [fairytale] space. The legal department said, 'We think it would be safest, from a legal perspective, to have American sign a piece of paper saying we own his name in connection to this [product], and then call it American McGee's Alice.' I was resistant, but they said, 'Well, we think this is the best idea.' I had people telling me, 'Don't be stupid; of course you want your name on the box.'

I went back and told the team in Texas, Rogue Entertainment. And they were pissed. They weren't happy. From their perspective, it was, 'We're doing all the work, here. We're building all the levels, we're writing the code. We're operating in the shadows and you're getting all the interviews and all the credit.' I said, 'Yeah, I understand.' I went back to EA and lobbied for that not to be the name of the game. They said, 'Okay, if you really don't want to do that.'

I thought I had a win. I went back to the team and said, 'Hey, guys, I convinced EA to not call it this.' They were happy. They rejoiced and said, 'Oh, you're a great guy. Thanks so much.' Then about a week before the game was finished, I got a call [from EA] and they said, 'By the way, we're still going to call it American McGee's Alice.'

By that point I had already signed this piece of paper that said they could control my name. I had to go back to the team, and they were pissed. They were like, 'This isn't right.' But it was too late. I can laugh about it now, but at the time I was distraught. I was very upset. I remember getting on the phone with my creative partner, and him saying, 'How should you break this to them?' It made me quite uncomfortable.

But then it became sort of a thing. Fortunately for me, that first game did quite well, and I've got a weird name, so it makes it easy for people to remember its association with products. It's been largely advantageous for me.

Craddock: Since you were at Maxis, did you get many opportunities to talk with Will Wright?

American McGee: When I came out of id, I think I'd been [in a bubble]. There weren't a lot of rules both within the organization and in my own life, I think as a result of hanging out with rock stars. Meeting Will Wright, he was interesting to me because he was like John Carmack in terms of smarts, but with this laidback, California-hippie, pot-smoking, very personable personality. If you can imagine a [precise and detail-oriented] personality combined with somebody who smokes pot, you have Will—quite different, but at the same time quite similar to John Carmack. I would spend time going to lunch with Will, talking about game design and method.

A lot of it his leading by example: seeing how he interacted with his team, seeing how he worked through design. He had an emphasis on design instead of technology. I took inspiration from the idea that a person could have a role within a development organization which was purely focused on storytelling, gameplay mechanics, presentation, and challenge to the player, sort of getting into the player's mind in a more strategic way as opposed to what we [at id] were doing with first-person shooters, which were all about action and adrenaline.

I was only at Maxis there at Redwood Shores for... I don't know if it was even a full year. That was the period when they were working on The Sims, so I was going to quite a few meetings for The Sims. I don't know if it was only my suggestion, but I know that one of my suggestions was that the Sims could pee on themselves. I had some darkness injected into that.

I remember we had a meeting for Sim Mars, which was going to be a Mars-colonization game that I don't think ever went anywhere. I remember being in the room and suggesting that, 'Well, if the death of the colonists was going to reduce the efficiency and happiness of the remaining colonists, why can't I have those colonists drive a tractor out far away from the colony, dig a hole for themselves, and get in it?' I was disinvited from design meetings for that project after that.

Craddock: You're still in Shanghai, 12 hours ahead of me, yet all of our interviews have taken place at 6:00am your time or earlier. Have you always been an early riser?

American McGee: I have been for a long time, especially the last 10 years. The two big projects the studio developed, Grimm and Alice, in both instances the publisher/funding source was back in the US. With Grimm, the publisher was in Atlanta; that was GameTap. I would get up early [because of the time difference] to interface with them.

Another thing is it's just quieter. You can get a lot more work done in the morning. If you go into the office at 7:00 a.m., there's no one on the streets. It's very pleasant to be outside. But if you wait until everyone else is going to work, it can be a madhouse. For me, it's always been nice to get up early and start tackling things.

Craddock: You probably get questions about Alice all the time, but I'd like to talk about your Grimm series of episodic games. I reviewed those for Joystiq back in 2008, and really enjoyed them. How did that project get started?

American McGee: It was such a weird project. There was a guy at GameTap named Ricardo [Sanchez, vice president of content and creative director for GameTap]. He's a comic-book guy. You'd find him as the executive producer. He called me up out of the blue when I was living in Hong Kong. I was writing a film script, taking a year off and living on this remote island, disconnected from the world and happy about it. I suddenly got this phone call from this guy about a thing called GameTap, which I'd never heard of before. He said, 'We want you to make a game. You'll own the rights. We'll pay you based on easy milestones.'

I said, 'Well, I don't have a studio or a team, but I've been traveling to China a lot. If I was going to do this, I'd want to start a studio there. Would you allow me to take your $3 million and build a studio in China?' And he said, 'Yeah, go for it.' Which is insane, right? Nobody does that.

I didn't have anyone. A partner, a technical person, a concept artist, no one. He said, 'Go for it,' so we did. I built the studio and was very fortunate to attract some of the most talented and well-respected animators, programmers, and 3D artists early on. They helped build up the team.

Craddock: I wondered, because the episodes were released in rapid succession.

American McGee: We could only build small chunks of content. We couldn't build in a lot of interaction for the player because we didn't have the time, so it was going to be mainly set building. That was where the concept of converting the world from light to dark came from. We did a proof of concept of that, and it looked really cool on-screen. So we said, 'All right, this is it. We don't know if this is right or not, but we're going to just run with it.'

Craddock: Grimm's gameplay was simple, but that's what I liked about it. You just ran around and dirtied this pristine, shiny world, and watched the scenery and characters change as a result. It was very easy to play. I remember just sitting back, holding the mouse buttons to move Grimm forward, and steering him occasionally.

American McGee: We were trying to play to strengths. We knew we could tell story, and we knew we had a story. The core concept was the transformation of [classic] stories. And we knew that at any moment, players would potentially start playing in a season that was already up and running. We weren't going to have a lot of time for [developing] episodes, which also meant we wouldn't have a lot of time to teach them stuff. We had to make it as simple as possible, and we were fortunate that GameTap was receptive to that.

What I liked was that from the first episode to the last, the game kept getting better in terms of design, mechanical implementations, what we were able to do in terms of presentation and story. It makes sense, because the last thing you build is the best thing you build. By the time we were getting to the last set of episodes, it was the best stuff the team had built.

As far as the design went, I knew we had a team who had never built something before, working with a technology they were going to have to teach ourselves as we went along—that was the Unreal engine—and that we had to start delivering within 12 months of opening our doors.

We had to deliver the first episode, and there had to be episodes coming out after that in quick succession. Twenty-four of them. It was a really insane challenge: Go to China, where you don't speak the language and don't know anyone; build a studio; get your first content out 12 months after you first turn the lights on. But I like a good challenge.

McGee's creative ventures show no signs of slowing down. Over the summer of 2017, he ran a Kickstarter campaign for Out of the Woods, a combination card-game-art-book featuring artwork reminiscent of his designs for American McGee's Alice. McGee hoped to raise $175,000 in funding and received over $259,000. Out of the Woods is slated for a January 2018 release.

Out of the Woods, American McGee’s new card game/artbook was successfully funded on Kickstarter in the summer of 2017.

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