American McGee has come out of retirement to make an Alice spiritual successor based on his plushie empire

American McGee, the Quake alumnus famed for his eponymous action-adventure series based on Alice in Wonderland, is returning to game development with a spiritual successor inspired by his line of plushies. McGee retired from game development in 2023 after a pitch for a third Alice game was rejected by EA. But nearly three years since hanging up his keyboard forever, McGee has apparently changed his mind.

Speaking to GamesRadar, McGee revealed that his return to game development was sparked by a confluence of inspiration. The first is his company Plushie Dreadfuls, which McGee and his wife Yeni Zhang started in 2015 while trying to support their pitch for that third Alice game (titled Alice: Asylum). The line proved immensely successful, to the point where McGee paid back an ancient loan to id Software cofounder John Carmack. “It’s like a rocket that took off without us knowing there was even a rocket,” McGee told GamesRadar.

But it was tending a Plushie Dreadfuls pop-up shop in Tokyo that really brought McGee’s mind back to gaming, as Japanese fans expressed their love of the Alice games. “[I] realis[ed] that I still have these stories to tell,” McGee explained. “I can’t just sit on these [ideas], because when I sit on ideas like that, it makes me crazy.”

McGee’s spiritual successor is still at a nascent stage, but it apparently will follow the story of James, an orphan like Alice who gets taken under the dark wing of the Plushie Dreadfuls family. In a story outline posted to Instagram, McGee says the game will be tied directly to Alice: Madness Returns, the second and, thus far, final entry in the series.

“I’ve made an explicit point to link the start of the Plushie Dreadfuls game with the end of Madness Returns. And, in doing that, you [can] call that a spiritual sequel,” McGee says. “There’s a kind of obvious overlap, but not one that gets us in trouble with the lawyers.”

McGee spent a decade trying to get a third Alice game off the ground with EA, doing a large amount of preproduction that culminated in a design bible released on McGee’s Patreon page. Ultimately though, the publisher would neither greenlight a new game or consider selling the IP, deeming Alice “an important part of EA’s overall game catalog” according to a statement McGee made on his Patreon page in 2023.

Personally, I’ve always liked the idea of the Alice games more than the games themselves. But there’s no denying that a lot of people have huge affection for the series, and I certainly wouldn’t mind McGee having another crack at it, spiritually or otherwise. Given McGee has full control over this project, hopefully it has a better chance of seeing the light of day.