For the past several years, American McGee has been making crowdfunding efforts to produce a third entry in its series of action-horror games based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. These efforts produced a 414-page bible design for “Alice: Asylum”, which McGee used to pitch the project to rights holders Electronic Arts.
McGee says Electronic Arts decided to pass on the project. As such, McGee says he “reached an end point with ‘Alice’ and the game production in general.”
McGee made an offer to Electronic Arts to secure the “funding and/or license” required to make Alice: Asylum. The presentation included not only the story, concept art, and design book created via Patreon, but the production plan that laid out a timeline, budget, and team for the new game.
According to McGee, EA, for its part, passed funding for the project “based on an internal analysis of intellectual property, market conditions, and details of the production bid.” They are also not willing to license IP.
McGee Books An advertisement for Patreon. “And I have no interest in pursuing new game ideas within the context of the current game development environment.”
He went on to write that if someone convinced EA to make a new Alice game in the future, they would have “no desire to get involved”.
McGee began his game development career at Id Software and worked on Doom 2 and Quake and Quake 2, before being fired in 1998. He later joined Electronic Arts, where he was creative director on American McGee’s Alice, released in 2000. He then founded Shanghai – based Spicy Horse studio and developed a sequel, Alice: Madness Returns, released in 2011. In recent years, he has achieved manufacturing success Horror themed plush toys.
Although it looks like Alice: Asylum will never become a video game, the design bible is. Available as a free download from McGee’s Patreonso you can see what it could be.
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