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.
"It's like a rocket that took off without us knowing that there was even a rocket there to begin with," he says about Plushie Dreadfuls, which McGee and his wife Yeni Zhang started in 2015, "as I was trying to get out of the game development world." The pair made their first rabbit plush while supporting Alice: Asylum, as an homage to the white rabbit Alice clutches in her first game when she retreats into Wonderland, a treacherous fantasy representative of her slipping sanity.
While looking at the spill of moody concept art and narrative ideas McGee has been posting to his social media since December, when he first announced his intentions of making a Plushie Dreadfuls game, I see Alice's ghost everywhere. It's in the balance of whimsy and death McGee often experiments with, evidenced in artist Si'yann's concept art of an inviting hat shop propped up by a human skull leaking mercury.
Sometimes, the spirit of Alice is even more obvious – while blue tears ribbon down his face, James holds the Plushie Dreadfuls Alice rabbit McGee also sent me after our interview. Its cleft lip seems unhappily pursed, and in keeping it on my bed, I've observed that its black hole eyes seem to notice what I'm feeling before I do.
Or, I'm just projecting onto a stuffed animal again. James does it too. To him, the Alice plush is "the only thing that feels real," McGee writes in a narrative outline. Like his games, McGee's stuffies exist playfully in the shadows – striped with scars, they're not as sunlit as their cute exteriors would suggest. They put me in the place fellow rabbit enthusiast and Silent Hill designer Usagi Tanaka first told me about regarding his Robbie the Rabbit mascot – "cute but scary," a zone where you can acknowledge tragedy without being engulfed in it.
In returning to gaming, McGee credits Japanese fans who attended a Plushie Dreadfuls pop-up shop in Tokyo in December – inspiring him with handwritten notes about how much his Alice games meant to them.
"It was really, really moving," McGee says. "I literally cried on a couple of occasions, and I felt bad for the people that brought me these notes, because they suddenly have this grown man crying in front of them." But, you know, tears make space for epiphanies, and the experience made him "realize that, I still have these stories to tell," McGee says. "I can't just sit on these [ideas], because when I sit on ideas like that, it makes me crazy."
So "softly. On soil that looks like velvet. Smells faintly of smoke and sugar," as McGee writes in a Plushie Dreadfuls story outline, "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."
In that sense, the in-progress Plushie Dreadfuls game is helping McGee "achieve a certain level of closure," and he expects fans will feel the same.
"Alice, in some ways, she was drawing off of past experiences that I had as a child," McGee explains. "With writing the character for James, it's a very similar thing. He's an orphan, but he's been adopted into this kind of dark, evil family." Since the Plushie Dreadfuls themselves are shrunken totems of emotion and mental health conditions, McGee emphasizes the game will be about exploring those feelings.
Alice, blood-splotched and indignant, instead had the more active goal of pushing her abuser in front of a train. Revenge, to her, is indeed pastry cream sweet. With this in mind, I ask McGee what the Alice games might taste like.
"That's a tough one," he says. "I would imagine people might suggest, on the outside, they taste sweet, interesting – you know, when you first fall into that world. But in the center is something dark and gooey and bitter." With the Plushie Dreadfuls project, I'm looking forward to taking another bite.
12 years on, the bleakly beautiful world of the Alice games is enchanting as ever.
