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MGON recently took some time to chat with former id member American McGee about his most recent work on a movie based upon his game Alice, as well as his general history in the gaming industry. The movie will be called Dark Wonderland and is being made by a new company Carbon Entertainment -- produced by horror legend Wes Craven. McGee hopes it will break the stigma many video game-inspired movies have attached to them. Here are excerpts from the interview with more on the matter:

This summer has been fairly important in terms of the relationship between film and videogames. What do you feel films like Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy did well? Did poorly?

I think that both movies illustrated an extremely important point that Carbon6 is hoping to capitalize on in the future. That is that both came out by themselves and didn’t launch products in the game world to match with the films. It seems that Eidos missed out huge by not having a new version of Tomb Raider out to coincide with the release of the film. Even a slapped together remake of a previous version could have capitalized on the huge buzz created by the film. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of slapped together games, and Carbon isn’t going to be in the business of creating those types of properties. The point is that there’s an amazing synergy to be drawn on when games and movies are created in collaboration with one another.

How will Dark Wonderland, the big screen adaptation of Alice, avoid the many pitfalls videogames face when being translated to film?

Hopefully we’ll worry more about making a good movie than about trying to stay true to the game version. There’s an amazing story in the Alice idea and we’re just going to try hard to make sure that story is told as well as we know how to tell it.

American McGee Interview at MGON

IMG Review of Alice

Aspyr Media

Westlake Interactive

Rogue Entertainment

American McGee's Alice

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