I thought I'd learned a lot about American McGee's 2011 game Alice: Madness Returns in the years since declaring the grungy fairytale series some of my all-time favorite games, but I never knew about… the dildo snails.
"I tried searching my emails for it and failed," former id Software developer McGee says on Twitter. "Then I tried to Google it. Yeah, don't try to Google it." Dildo snails aren't the kind of thing human hands are meant to go searching for. But, at the time of Madness Returns' production, Alice publisher EA was practically begging for it.
McGee provides insight into his former relationship with EA – it curdled when the publisher passed on his careful pitch for a third game, Alice: Asylum – in an April 23 Twitter post. He reacts to a compilation of teaser trailers that fans have been noting for 15 years as incongruous to the game. McGee explains, "It would be fair to say that there was a fairly big disconnect between the game I wanted to make and the game EA Marketing wanted me to make when we were developing Madness Returns."
"The marketing team felt strongly that a Hard M title focused on gore, horror, and featuring a 'psychotic' Alice was what audiences would respond to best," he continues. This is evident from watching those teasers – in one, Alice has her hair fluffed in quintessentially 2011 scene girl layers, wearing a tight, pristine white apron she quickly soils with blood as she opens her mouth and a front tooth pops out.
In the Madness Returns game that launched, horror lives in dirty floorboards and the back of Alice's mind – it's rarely as explicit as a spilled bucket of blood. And Alice's outfits prioritize whimsy over dressing for your body type – the Caterpillar dress, for example, wraps her in bulbous insect parts and tops her off with a twirly pair of antennae. Her 19-year-old sex appeal is never part of Madness Returns… especially because it's a game where the heroine kills her lecherous abuser in the end.
But EA didn't get it. McGee summoned the snails. He says, "I did NOT want [to] portray Alice as a psycho, cover her in blood, or 'make things more sexy' (yes, that was a request)".
"Famously, I pasted dildos onto the head of a giant snail in response to the 'sexy' request and emailed that to the Marketing team. They stopped making those requests."
GamesRadar+ resident retro gaming enthusiast and writer Dustin Bailey also alerted me to how McGee, in his own words during a 2025 interview, spent a lot of time "protecting Alice" from EA as they asked for her "to have a shorter skirt."
"Out of my office!" says McGee. "I was mad. I was like, 'Are you kidding me? Do you know what this story is about? And you're asking me what happens if you look up her skirt?"
The brave snails with dildos on their heads finally taught EA the lesson it was having trouble with, and fans received an appropriately stylish fantasy game. Anyway, "I liked the marketing for what it was," McGee mentions in another Twitter post. "Excellent quality and content. Just slightly misaligned with what we developed."
