American McGee's latest Kickstarter is in trouble

News
By published
americanmcgee

American McGee found some success in developing Alice Madness Returns, but the former id Software level designer's latest kickstarter , an action-adventure game set in an alternate version of The Wizard of Oz called OZombie has run into a few snags—the “can't get enough money” snags, specifically.

“Probably the most obvious (mistake) is in the naming of the game,” McGee said. “The title OZombie, which we thought was pretty cute and which I thought from a storytelling perspective did a pretty good job of going to the heart of the narrative theme of the game.

“But the problem is people are confusing this application of 'zombie' with the version that we're seeing more frequently these days—which is these brain-hungry flesh-eating zombies—when in fact we're using an older version of the term that refers to social or political situations where people give away their ability to make decisions.”

McGee also said the studio didn't expect so many people to ask for gameplay footage of OZombie. He'd seen successful campaigns like Massive Chalice (which had no gameplay footage) and assumed people wouldn't need to see gameplay before investing in the project.

As for the possible failure of OZombie's kickstarter campaign, McGee said his Shanghai-based development studio (called Spicy Horse Games ) is “perfectly fine” with working on new and existing projects that can be self-funded.

As of writing, OZombie has $138,147 its $950,000 goal funded and has 23 days left to get there.