Alice Madness Returns

I haven’t played the previous Alice. Are there any plans to bring it back as a downloadable game before the sequel comes out?American McGee: It’s certainly endured with the fans. I think that there’s an audience for it, but at this moment we’re just focused on Alice: Madness Returns. Any bringing it back would be up to EA and EA Partners. R.J. and I were here as employees when we created the first Alice.Wired.com 

Since this will probably be many people’s first experience, I’m guessing you’re crafting the game in such a way that you don’t need to have played the original to enjoy it.McGee: Yeah, but there’s a definite need for us to honor and answer to the existing audience, people who’ve been loyal fans to the property over the years. We’ve done our best to blend together into the story elements from the first game. This is a natural sequel, a narrative sequel to the first game. So we get back in there and people who know the first game are going to have a lot of reward in terms of seeing locations that they may have seen before, characters that they knew from the first game. But it’s certainly not a requirement, bringing this game to console for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 players, for them to have played the PC one.McGee: For the first game, the idea was to make a solid platformer. The other tenets were the art, which at the time was really out there in terms of its ability to present art as a core of the experience. R.J. wrote the first game’s story, and he’s writing the story for Madness Returns. 

I think if you ask anybody about the way that story is presented in the title, you’ll find that was one of the things that was really unique about it. At the time with PC gaming, the Half-Lifes and things like that hadn’t hit just yet. And so we felt, I think our fallout shelter hack of audience felt, that we really nailed it in terms of how we delivered story and got the player immersed in the game.Coming back now to the story in Madness Returns, we’re once again focused on these things: really good story, solid third-person platforming gameplay, adventure, action, exploration and puzzle solving.Wired.com: You bring up an interesting point, because after Alice came out there was a revolution in game storytelling. What do you do differently now that you have to clear a higher bar for people who’ve played BioShock, who’ve played Half-Life?R.J. Berg: I don’t think that we’ve looked upon them as necessarily raising the bar so much as expanding people’s acceptance of what they could do on a console. We are extremely impressed with BioShock, for instance. Still, we thought that by basing our game on such a strong intellectual property, and Alice being such a deep and rich font of intellectual property, that we were already stretching out the sense of action-adventure, and maybe one that was not particularly well-suited 10 years ago. 

Whereas now, with something like BioShock, Half-Life, games that have really improved our notion of what you can do, what kind of deep story you can tell on that platform, we’re pretty confident that our audience will come right along with us. We’re pretty happy about this direction.Wired.com: I just finished reading the book Extra Lives, and now my head is filled with big words: It reminded me of Clint Hocking’s blog post about ludonarrative dissonance in BioShock, how the gameplay and the narrative can go out of whack with each other. Is that something you’re concerned about?McGee: Well, I think his idea of dissonance is that it made the entertainment experience so jolting, so shocking. In the first Alice, we were playing with narrative shocks and twists, and they obviously hit home with people who played the game. In Madness Returns, it’s much more of the same and then some.I think that storytelling, which is R.J.’s forte, doesn’t necessarily need to catch up to anything, it’s that the technology has to be applied in a way that honors the story you want to tell and doesn’t cause a disconnect from the audience. You want to find a balance between this thing that is game and this thing that is story. That’s the truth of it — you’re not letting these pieces get in the way of each other unless, in the instance of BioShock, you’re turning something on its head for the key purpose of, “Oh my God, I can’t believe this whole time I’ve been in this thing and this thing has been talking to me.”