Alice: Madness Returns - America McGee Interview Feature

Founded in 2007, America McGee's Spicy Horse studio is the largest independent Western developer in China and, when Alice: Madness Returns launches next month, it'll be the first console game to have been developed entirely in China for export. Recently, TVG had the opportunity to speak with McGee, the Creative Director on Madness Returns about the formation of Spicy Horse and returning to his vision of Alice 10 years after the first game was released.

Why take the decision to go back to Alice after a decade?

Well there's nothing magic about the decade. It came down to having moved to Shanghai and built a studio there that was capable of making this new product. I went to EA and talked to them with ideas about how we might re-present the game and about what the studio was capable of doing, they got on board and here we are: almost finished with the game.

I know in the interim you've been involved in a lot of different things - I read somewhere that you wrote the script for a film based in the Oz universe. So, how much time have you spent working in games or doing other things in the ten years in-between?

So, there were four years in Los Angeles. Some period of that was working on the Oz video game, which eventually got cancelled before it was done, and then that was also an opportunity to get involved in a film version of that, which never got a green-light but I did get a chance to write a script for it. While I was there I also dabbled in music videos in the commercial world a little bit and made a couple of other contributions to some smaller game projects, but then moved to Hong Kong where I worked on a game for a year or so - a very terrible game - but it gave me a good exposure to development in China. It was a good lesson of what not to do. I then actually spent a year there living on a little, remote island in Hong Kong where I wrote the Oz script and, in that period, I got the offer to start a game studio, which I took up to Shanghai and built a studio.

So really the last, almost seven years has been out in China with the last four-and-a-half years in Shanghai. In the studio in Shanghai, the first product was the Grimm game - a series of episodic games for PC - and then the last two years have been spent working on Alice.

In terms of building that team, did you employ locally or was it mostly ex-pats?

It was a combination. When we arrived in Shanghai it was myself and an Art Director named Ken Wong, who I've been creatively partnered with for a number of years, and we began to assemble a team that was made up of a smaller number of ex-pats who were either in China already, or had reason to want to move to China to help us start a studio. But the core of the team that founded the studio with us was Chinese locals who also had many years of experience making games, working for companies like Ubisoft - they've got a pretty big studio up there.

They've done some good stuff actually, Ubisoft Shanghai...

Yeah. They've been very helpful to us in terms of helping us build our studio [laughs], by way of us hiring away a lot of their guys. The studio we have got up to almost 75 people at its peak internally, and another 50 externally doing 3D asset production. These days we've shrunk back down to around 55, which is manageable for the kinds of projects we're going to work on next.

In terms of that, what kind of projects are you doing next?

So, we just secured investment financing which we're going to put towards the development of original intellectual properties, and all of that's going to be targeted towards free-to-play, downloadable online multiplayer games, which are going to be on PC and mobile platforms. This was actually the reason that I went to China in the first place - to work on downloadable games for PC - and Alice has been a beautiful distraction. But we want to get into the reason that we originally formed the studio.

Getting back on to Alice, I'm loving the triple-jump. It's been a while since I've played a game with one of those. Alice: Madness Returns actually feels very platformy...

It's very classic; very old-school.

The sections I played through were quite hack 'n slashy as well but the impressions I've got from some of the trailers is that you mix up the genres a bit, so there appears to be 2D platform sections as well...

There's a lot of variety in the content. You may not have seen it in the demo down there but as you move through the game, each new domain in the game features a presentation of what we call a 'domain specific ability', which is often about a unique presentation of gameplay. There's one of them which is 'Off With Her Head', where Alice's head is turned into a doll's head which is tossed into an environment and it rolls through it in a kind of Marble Madness presentation. You saw the 2D side-scrolling play; there's a giant Alice gameplay. So, there's a lot of variety and some unique ways of presenting gameplay but, at its core, it's still really about action adventure, exploration, and hack 'n slash platforming. It's a good mix though.

In terms of the overall conceit, where have you moved between the original and this sequel in terms of what's happened to Alice and the motivations in the story?

This is very much a narrative sequel to the first game, so it picks up a year after the ending of the last game where we saw Alice leaving the asylum having vanquished her emotional demons. In this one, we now find her having lived in London for some time and still dealing with the repercussions of the fire that killed her family. This time around though, instead of trying to conquer the internal demons, it's all about solving the external problem of who or what killed her family. So it's in fact a murder mystery at its core but once again she uses Wonderland as a tool - she's able to go into her own mental landscape and piece together the events of that night, and thereby discover who did it.