The movie "Alice's new adventures "
By admin on 2015-01-05

As Walt Disney Pictures revels in the international box office success of latest 3D fantasy adventure film Alice in Wonderland and Chinese cinemas celebrate an opening $5.1 million weekend, a creative crew housed in an old building once home to smugglers and pirates in Shanghai is busy at work, making a sequel to a cult classic computer game that saw Alice carrying a bloodied butcher's knife.

The return of American McGee's Alice was announced February at an industry forum, with a small Shanghai studio at the helm.

American McGee is Senior Creative Director at Shanghai-based Spicy Horse, a studio that the 37-year-old set up three and a half years ago. McGee's PC game American McGee's Alice hit the shelves in 2000 with resounding success, reflecting his somewhat sinister look at life.

"I more or less gravitated to a darker telling of it. I've always been a fan of music and fiction and art that has a darker side to it. That's coming out of a bizarre childhood and the strange family environment that I had," McGee told the Global Times. "It was sort of a natural adaptation for me and the property itself has a lot of shadows that could be explored," he added.

Set after the events in Lewis Carroll's 1871 classic Through the Looking-Glass, McGee's Alice is driven mad by the death of her parents in a fire and is institutionalized, only to be drawn back to a wonderland as twisted as her own sanity with the mission of saving it.

The game was a huge hit when released, creating an almost religious following and receiving rave reviews. New copies still sell for up to $200 a piece. As the man behind the twisted interpretation of a well-loved fairy tale, McGee found himself at the center of the gaming world's attention.

The dark version of Alice made his employers and publishers of the game, Electronic Arts, a little nervous, however it went on to be commissioned as a movie. Despite scripts being written, McGee said that disagreements between writers and directors have resulted in nothing coming to fruition, a situation, that the creative director added is "a typical Hollywood process – you can wait 10 years for a film to get made and then suddenly it's done in a few months."

A native of Dallas, Texas, McGee explained that his unusual on the world stems from his childhood.

"I didn't have a typical upbringing," he said. "It's probably why I spent a lot of time as a child being creative and spend a lot of time as an adult being creative."

Recently releasing American McGee's Grimm, McGee is no stranger to the dark side of gaming, previously working on popular titles Doom and Quake.

"We worked on that [Grimm] for two years and it went phenomenally well," McGee recalled. "Instead of producing one game, we actually delivered 24 individual small games. It was pretty unheard of. In the times before and in the times since, no one else has managed to do that and it was in a time when we were in the middle of starting up the games studio … from scratch … in China!"

Grimm sees the adaptation of classic fairy tales by the Brother's Grimm, with gamers taking on the protagonist, Grimm the angry dwarf, as he seeks to change bright and pretty stories into dark and bloody tales.

The work was McGee's first major project from his Shanghai base, after spending two years in Hong Kong as an independent developer.

While working in Hong Kong, McGee designed Bad Day LA, a political commentary on American society. The game was a bit of a flop, but doors started to open when Disney and Bruckheimer picked one of his former games as a movie project and asked McGee to be the scriptwriter. The game chosen was based on the classic The Wizard of Oz and McGee spent a year on Lamma Island, working on the concept.

"They said it was great but far too dark for Disney," McGee said, acknowledging another idea that never made the screen. "They said they'd get back to me and I haven't heard from them since."

The possibility of McGee's Alice being made into a movie now also looks even less likely than before with Tim Burton's spin dominating international cinema screens. As McGee moves onto to yet another new project, his fans are busy speculating on Burton's inspiration for his latest work.

"I would say though that there are some, elements that are really quite close to what we did in the game," McGee said in reference to Burton's Alice in Wonderland. "I also get a sense that somebody working on the film had played the game and was making an effort to stay away from some of the things we did, but we are all working from the same fiction so it's hard not to see some similarities."

There's talk that Little Red Riding Hood will be the next fairy tale character on McGee's chopping block with the developer recently posting a concept on his flickr account for Red, the artwork by Ken Wong features a white-haired little girl in a very dark forest, embedding a massive axe into the skull of a demonic wolf.

Spicy Horse's latest app for iPhone, Crooked House, also came out last week, a puzzle game that is bound to be gruesome if you fail.

The small production house is currently searching for a publisher to pick up Red, with McGee's interesting empire looking likely to live on – not so happily ever after.