American McGee to exec-produce Scrapland

Hong Kong based published Enlight has announced that it will publish Mercury Steam's Scrapland, and that American McGee will serve as executive producer on the game - which is due for release at the end of 2004 on PC and Xbox.

Enlight originally enlisted the former Id Software man and creator of "American McGee's Alice" a few months ago as the firm's creative director. This is the first project he's been openly attached to since then. "I knew I wanted to be involved with this project the moment I met with Mercury Steam and saw the game," he said in a statement this week.

The game, Scrapland, puts players in charge of D-Tritus, a robotic chap built - as his name implies - out of junk. Faced with a series of murders on a planet where people were previously thought to be immortal, he wanders the streets of a place called Chimera trying to solve them, transforming himself by way of upgrades that take the form of more strap-on-able junk.

It's also a very open-ended project according to McGee. "Scrapland has an extremely unique free-form style of play that capitalises on the success of games like GTA3, yet it takes the action one step further," he added.

Enlight will presumably be hoping that this, coupled with McGee's attachment, will inspire a bit more interest in the game than some of its previous titles. We'll certainly be interested to see what sort of influence McGee has on Spanish developer Mercury Steam when the game approaches completion later this year.