American McGee seeks to bring kart-racing MMO to the west
by James Egan 
Oct 24th 2008 at 11:00AM
Filed under: Video, MMO industry, New titles, News items, Casual
Lots of people predict a new game being the next WoW-killer, or at least irritate others with those predictions, but in China some people are talking about a KartRider-killer. One of the most popular games in China -- indeed, throughout Asia -- is an MMO based off of GoKart racing and it looks like other competitors are about to take on Nexon's KartRider dominance. What's interesting is that the main person behind this is none other than American McGee, who's now turning his attention to the MMO space with a new game called BaiJiu Racer, which our sister site Big Download reports.
If you've ever played the trippy game American McGee's Alice, a twisted continuation of Alice in Wonderland released in 2000, you'll probably remember his name. American McGee currently heads up the Shanghai-based Spicy Horse game studio which most recently developed the episodic PC game Grimm. BaiJiu Racer (context: BaiJiu is a 120 proof liquor) already has a Chinese publisher, but McGee is seeking to bring the title to western markets as well, and is putting out a call to interested parties. While a kart-racing game might not seem like the most viable MMO game to release outside of Asia, you might want to have a look at the trailer found below the cut, it looks like fun.
If you'd like to see more of BaiJiu Racer, check out the concept art on Flickr and American McGee's YouTube channel. And of course, you can read more about the game and its status on his blog.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Evilbert420 said on 11:24AM 10-24-2008
Yawn. McGee is a developer who was big on potential but short on execution. Just because he was a level designer he feels then need to plaster his name on all his products like he's some kind of peer to Sid Meier, Will Wright or Peter Moleneux.
In reality his products have been consistently sub-par and commercial failures. Alice was released 8 (!) years ago to mediocre reviews and poor sales. Bad Day L.A. was a complete disaster (28 at metacritic).
If he's so amazing that he precedes every game with his name, then how come none of his games are worth playing? He's just another John Romero: egomaniac who got lucky being on a great dev team in the mid 90's and hasn't been able to come close to repeating success on their own, thinking that THEY were the reason for the success.
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kabshiel said on 12:33PM 10-24-2008
So it's a really, really bad version of Mario Kart?
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