30-year video game industry veteran American McGee once helped make Doom and Quake, but now he's spending time on James, the protagonist with bedhead who only exists in the preliminary stages of storyboarding – plus, as "my middle name," McGee tells me during our recent Zoom call. But since James is set to star in the follow-up to McGee's 2011 cult classic Alice: Madness Returns, he, as Alice's fellow orphan in arms, might have the power to bring back the franchise fans like me assumed was really, really dead.
In 2023, publisher EA shut down McGee's meticulously crafted pitch for Alice: Asylum, a proposed third game in the American McGee's Alice series that began in 2000. Hurt, McGee planned to retire from games entirely – but, this year, the character James and McGee's stuffed animal business Plushie Dreadfuls began clawing him back. McGee is now working to create a spiritual successor to Alice: Madness Returns, an official Plushie Dreadfuls game set in a semi-alternate universe populated by 330 button-eyed plush rabbits.
