American McGee revisits Alice with a dark spiritual successor after EA clashes
Alice creator American McGee has been in something of a chatty mood lately. Just a couple days after relating a tale about how he drew inspiration from a Valve demo he saw while working on Quake 2 at id, he shared another story about Alice: Madness Returns, offering a fun glimpse into game dev financing, dildo snails, and maybe why EA may have decided not to move ahead with a third game in the series.
"It would be fair to say that there was a fairly big disconnect between the game I wanted to make and the game EA Marketing wanted me to make when we were developing Madness Returns," McGee wrote on X. "The marketing team felt strongly that a hard M title focused on gore, horror, and featuring a 'psychotic' Alice was what audiences would respond to best."
McGee felt differently, and we might as well get this out of the way right off the top: This is where the dildo snails come into play.
"I did NOT want to portray Alice as a psycho, cover her in blood, or 'make things more sexy' (yes, that was a request)," he continued. "Famously, I pasted dildos onto the head of a giant snail in response to the 'sexy' request and emailed that to the Marketing team."
"They stopped making those requests."
(In a separate tweet, McGee said he looked for images of those snails in his emails, but was unable to dig them up. He then tried to Google it, and the result of that effort was a recommendation against doing that. I did it anyway, and what I saw was far from the worst thing I've ever seen on the internet, but also probably not safe for work.)
From there, McGee explained that he was able to refuse these requests because of the way Alice: Madness Returns was financed: Not by EA, but by a bank in Los Angeles, in a "bond finance" deal similar to what's used for film projects. As long as Spicy Horse, the Shanghai-based dev studio McGee set up in 2007, stayed on schedule and within the budget, it had complete creative control: The only restriction was that the project had to stick to the design and script the studio submitted to EA at the end of pre-production.
"And we did," McGee wrote. "For the entire project, we never missed a milestone. And as a result, we could say 'no' to any and all requests or demands from EA."
"We made history in relation to all this. Madness Returns wasn't just the first AAA game fully developed by a Chinese team. It was also the first ever game to be bond financed in China. We were also the first team ever to tell EA gyf and (kinda) get away with it."
Now, is it likely that EA declined Alice 3 because it's holding a grudge? Not really. This was a long time ago, and more pointedly, business is business: If EA reckons there's sufficient dollars on the table, then all will be forgiven no matter what anyone did. Still, it is kind of amusing to imagine Andrew Wilson getting up from his desk and yelling at McGee as he walks into the office, "Hey! Hey! I told you you're not allowed in here anymore, god dammit!"
McGee, for the record, is currently working on something kind of Alice adjacent: A spiritual successor based on his Plushie Dreadfuls toys. In another tweet posted earlier this week, McGee said he's got "a little team" working on it, "all people I've known, loved, and trusted for years."
