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American McGee starting to work on a pitch for 'Alice: Asylum' to be presented to EA

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FelipeMGM

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http://www.americanmcgee.com/alice-3/

September 2017 – Fresh off the success of "Out of the Woods" on Kickstarter American McGee will start work on a proposal for the next chapter in Alice's adventures, tentatively titled "Alice: Asylum." This proposal will include artwork, design outline, and financial/business model. When this proposal is finished it'll be sent to EA. You can show your support for this project by signing up to the mailing list below.

Let's show EA how many people want a new Alice game!

Follow American on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook for updates on project development. Join the weekly live-streams on YouTube to give direct feedback and suggestions to American and the pre-production team!
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I've lost all respect for the guy after his Gamergate allyship. What an inconsiderate and unemphatic dude.

Besides, it was probably Spicy Horse and the talented Chinese artists that made Madness Returns so beautiful.
 
purseowner said:
I'd be excited for this if his GamerGate ramblings hadn't put me off the guy so much.
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I was gonna say I'd be totally in if they just basically remade Madness Returns and cut about 75% of the length, but is he one of those people?

I can't see EA being into this either way though, MR didn't make any money, did it? That thing was selling for pennies by the time people started buying it. Only way they're getting money for another Alice game is on Kickstarter or the like, and if EA have the IP it's a no-go.
 
I would love a third game, the first two are still so memorable

Edit: after seeing the new content in this thread, the most he seems to be is a moderate in the middle
 
I hope he goes more into the direction of the first game than the second.

The second was a let down in many many ways although it had some nice controls. The writing lost its bite too and became straight ostentatious.
 
Odd I’ve been reading about some of the old ID software guys and I’ve seen his name pop up a couple of times. Are the Alice games worth checking out?
 
Madness Resolved is the only game I've ever hate finished. The game started out okay, the graphics were good, the world was interesting, the platforming was alright, but it quickly become a miserable, repetitive, pointless grind. I've never hated a game so much that it actually became personal.
 
I was really with the last Alice game up until the end of the Walrus and Carpenter world. After that, everything seemed like a slog to get through. At least it was always horrifyingly pretty.
 
I thought that mobile game (can't remember the name) was meant to be the next Alice. Either way, it's a futile effort, A:MR was at the tail end of their short lived partners program and EA don't give a crap about anything but sports, Battlefield and Bioware at this point.
 
The Alice games looked great, but the gameplay was mediocre, so I hope it actually has good gameplay this time.
 
Azure Phoenix said:
I thought that mobile game (can't remember the name) was meant to be the next Alice. Either way, it's a futile effort, A:MR was at the tail end of their short lived partners program and EA don't give a crap about anything but sports, Battlefield and Bioware at this point.
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it could go through the EA Originals program (A Way Out, Fe, Unravel)
 
Azoor said:
The Alice games looked great, but the gameplay was mediocre, so I hope it actually has good gameplay this time.
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The problem with gameplay is, even though the aesthetic changes with each level you are basically doing the same platforming that u did last level.
 
I'm curious about the license status of this franchise. Anyone can do Alice games right? Does EA have the right American McGee's Alice or something?
 
Danjin44 said:
The problem with gameplay is, even though the aesthetic changes with each level you are basically doing the same platforming that u did last level.
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Also every level felt like it just dragged on forever so even the visuals/aesthetic got boring after awhile.
 
Bluth54 said:
Also every level felt like it just dragged on forever so even the visuals/aesthetic got boring after awhile.
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This is what I felt like with Madness Returns, which is why I played it in small parts as opposed to playing it for hours. I never had this problem with the original Alice game for some reason, so here's hoping this new project can breed the game more variety and replayability.
 
Lonely1 said:
I'm curious about the license status of this franchise. Anyone can do Alice games right? Does EA have the right American McGee's Alice or something?
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Correct on both accounts. The books "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the looking glass" are now public domain, however the videogame series "America McGee's Alice", the films "Tim Burtons Alice in Wonderland", and the numerous other interpretations of the series are not public domain, and if you based a work on one of them instead of the books, you'd be opening yourself up to legal trouble.

So American Mcgee cannot make a sequel to Alice without EA giving the go ahead.
 
FelipeMGM said:
it could go through the EA Originals program (A Way Out, Fe, Unravel)
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That program only seems to be for small scale digital games though, whereas Alice would be more of a Ratchet & Clank/Crash Trilogy tier release (retail, full length but not full price), something EA don't do anymore.
 
Lime said:
I've lost all respect for the guy after his Gamergate allyship...
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Wow, didn't know about that. Really disappointing.
Lime said:
...Besides, it was probably Spicy Horse and the talented Chinese artists that made Madness Returns so beautiful.
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Yup. And some considerable amount of credit probably goes to Art Director Ken Wong (Australian, Chinese heritage). Though some of what Wong said about McGee isn't too bad, which is actually why it is pretty surprising to me (and especially disappointing) to hear about McGee's allyship with Gamergate:
http://deadendthrills.com/little-china-doll-alice/
DET: ..The sequel to American McGee's Alice isn't great (8/10), solid (7/10), flawed (6/10) or average (5/10) – it's none of that nonsense. It's a living art book, an Alice novel with the ratio of words to pictures spun around. Inspired by such wild and offbeat things as Burning Man, Dave McKean, Zdzislaw Beksinski, The NeverEnding Story,The Dark Crystal and the Brothers Quay, more than anything it's a tribute to the mechanical and the handmade... Spicy Horse's crash course in surrealism had spawned one of the most extraordinary and diverse concept art collections a game has ever had, much of which adorns the 184 pages of The Art Of Alice: Madness Returns. The words in that book come largely from art director Ken Wong, who continues the story here...

Ken Wong: ...We had a combat designer, myself as the art director, and level designers all chipping in and designing various systems together....There was always this agenda to inject a lot of colour into the scenes, to have very vivid hallucinatory colours wherever we could... One of the challenges the Shanghai art team faced was creating surrealist, Victorian Gothic art, an unfamiliar realm for Chinese artists. This early piece shows concept artist Nako finding a foothold... surreal is this very subtle and disturbing thing, very psychological. You're taking something people know and understand and representing it in a way where something's not quite right, or where something people take for granted isn't quite the same... We wanted to put our finger on the pulse of why that first game had such resonance. Why were people still talking about Alice and making fan art of it ten years later? We looked at what people were producing and that's what helped the concept artists get a hold of what made this game special...

Ken Wong: From the beginning American told us that half of the people who played Alice were females – probably more than half of the hardcore fans. There were people who didn't really play videogames but who loved Alice, and that means a lot to me. We didn't really set out to design Alice for girls or for guys. Obviously most of the development team were guys, but we just wanted to make a cool character.... She's not framed in a relationship with a male, she's not the sidekick of a male, she's not a daughter, she's not the love interest. She's her own person. She's the star. It was really as simple as that... One of them was the costume where she's wearing the Mad Hatter's hat, and she looks a bit like the Mad Hatter. Each domain has its own list of materials that it uses, and one of them is leather. So I gave her these sort of leather hot pants. She still had a skirt on but it was a very short one. American was like: ‘No. Just no.' So we drew a line there. But every other costume we did got it right in that it was never designed to look sexy for men. It was never, ‘Please have sex with me.' It was about making Alice look cool or look different. For some people this whole debate is really silly. But it's just about: don't reduce yourself to making soft porn... There was this really weird thing where towards the end of the project, some feedback came from EA saying the game wasn't ‘M enough'. We weren't ‘fulfilling the potential' of our M rating. So they were like: ‘Can you make it more fucked up? Can you put more sex and violence into it?' Which is such a strange position to be in as it's normally the other way around. And we resisted. We were violent and sexy enough, thank you... We had concept art of a bald Alice very early on, and American was just like, ‘We've gotta have that in the game.' Dropping out all the colour and just making it white and black and red was something we were very excited to do. And again this environment of a Victorian asylum was just very exciting...
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EDIT: Some additional context, from subsequent posts in this thread: one / two / three
 
purseowner said:
I'd be excited for this if his GamerGate ramblings hadn't put me off the guy so much.
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Lime said:
I've lost all respect for the guy after his Gamergate allyship. What an inconsiderate and unemphatic dude.

Besides, it was probably Spicy Horse and the talented Chinese artists that made Madness Returns so beautiful.
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Garrett Hawke said:
Same. Love Alice and MR but his personal opinions are just so disagreeable that I couldn't support any of his projects.
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Please don't jump down my throat here - I'm likely asking from a position of ignorance - but is there a reason why you can't dissociate the creator from their content, and consume it separate of political opinion? Even if the author's a total scumbag, I feel like you can enjoy their work without condoning or supporting them. Though maybe I haven't unpacked this problem properly.
 
NippleViking said:
Please don't jump down my throat here - I'm likely asking from a position of ignorance - but is there a reason why you can't dissociate the creator from their content, and consume it separate of political opinion? Even if the author's a total scumbag, I feel like you can enjoy their work without condoning or supporting them. Though maybe I haven't unpacked this problem properly.
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Because they don't want to?
 
NippleViking said:
Please don't jump down my throat here - I'm likely asking from a position of ignorance - but is there a reason why you can't dissociate the creator from their content, and consume it separate of political opinion? Even if the author's a total scumbag, I feel like you can enjoy their work without condoning or supporting them. Though maybe I haven't unpacked this problem properly.
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I just don't want to be funding people who are actively working to make the world a worse place. Like I get that if I was to research every single thing I've ever bought there'd be a lot I couldn't have, but if relevant information finds it's way to me I'm not going to ignore it. Like I don't buy Nestle because their policies are disgusting.
 
That's well put Garrett and exactly how I feel. I loved the Alice games and until just now I would have been day 0 for another one, but if the choice is between a) a sequel never happening or b) knowingly contributing to the personal success of a someone who actively wants to make the world a darker place, I will go with the former.
 
Schopenhauerian said:
Wow, didn't know about that. Really disappointing.

Yup. And some considerable amount of credit probably goes to Art Director Ken Wong (Australian, Chinese heritage). Though some of what Wong said about McGee isn't too bad, which is actually why it is pretty surprising to me (and especially disappointing) to hear about McGee's allyship with Gamergate:
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yeah, you're right. FWIW, he did say no when EA wanted the game to be sexier and have more dick-strocking content.
 
NippleViking said:
Please don't jump down my throat here - I'm likely asking from a position of ignorance - but is there a reason why you can't dissociate the creator from their content, and consume it separate of political opinion? Even if the author's a total scumbag, I feel like you can enjoy their work without condoning or supporting them. Though maybe I haven't unpacked this problem properly.
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I don't fund bigots.
 
I loved Madness Returns (and Alice 1 back in the day) enough that I'm willing to separate the mans opinions from his art for a sequel.
 
Wow. Hope this happens. If not I hope at least I can get the art of Alice on the bed there as a print or something as it looks awesome.
 
The Alice games are two of my favorites, so I do hope we get a third.

As for his Gamergate views... it's a tad more complicated than people are saying in drive-by posts, especially considering the tragedy of his missing sister and the death threats directed at her shortly before her disappearance. Not that it makes him right or justifies his stance, but I'm still hoping she turns up alive and well... but it's been nearly two years now.
 
I hope it gets greenlighted... I'll play it regardless of his political/ethical views, like many other things I enjoy.
 
NippleViking said:
Please don't jump down my throat here - I'm likely asking from a position of ignorance - but is there a reason why you can't dissociate the creator from their content, and consume it separate of political opinion? Even if the author's a total scumbag, I feel like you can enjoy their work without condoning or supporting them. Though maybe I haven't unpacked this problem properly.
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Honestly, it feels like we need an American McGee OT for all the posters who would rather discuss the creator rather than the content, which is the actual subject of this thread.

Sure it's fair to want to avoid supporting the guy if you're so inclined, but ruining the signal-to-noise ratio of a discussion focused around a piece of their work is completely unnecessary.
 
Loved the Alice games so much so I'd be down for this.
 
I'd definitely be up for more Alice.

Schopenhauerian said:
Yup. And some considerable amount of credit probably goes to Art Director Ken Wong (Australian, Chinese heritage). Though some of what Wong said about McGee isn't too bad, which is actually why it is pretty surprising to me (and especially disappointing) to hear about McGee's allyship with Gamergate:
Click to expand...

That really doesn't sound very GamerGate-y. But then I haven't seen the tweets/post/whatever-it-was where he supposedly "allied" himself with GamerGate so who knows.
 
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