American McGee Has a Blank Canvas for Alice Sequel

Deadly jumping jacks, a vivisected dormouse, and a suicidal Alice were the products of famed designer American McGee’s first trip through the looking glass. There’s no telling where his second will take us.

“We’ve given him a blank canvas to go where he would like,” said David DeMartini, Electronic Arts Partners chief. “There is nothing set in stone and nothing has been removed either.”

Writing on his personal blog today, McGee said that the sequel to American McGee’s Alice, currently named The Return of American McGee’s Alice, will have the same writer and executive producer as the original game.

“The original Alice was a good bit of fun – and aspects of the original are still quite compelling,” he wrote. “The challenge for us – to build a great game, and a sequel worthy of the original – is real, but not daunting.

“For me, this is a dream come true.”

It could be for Electronic Arts Partner label as well.

Although the current project is part of a single game contract, it doesn’t mean that collaboration won’t lead to other titles down the line, DeMartini said.

“We are really having him focus on this one for now,” he said. “Letting him create as strong a game as he can.”

But if the game does well, it could lead to future projects.

DeMartini said that there currently aren’t any plans to bring the original Alice out of retirement, even as a port for the Playstation Network or Xbox Live Arcade, but that it “wasn’t a bad idea.”

He added that while the new Alice project, which isn’t connected in anyway to the film that has been in the works for yeas, is being developed for the PC, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, that doesn’t mean it will never come out on the Wii.

“It is possible we would revisit that,” he said.

“People loved the original game, loved the gameplay,” he said. “It was highly creative and interesting.”

When EA Partners started thinking about returning to Alice, they “felt that there would be no better place to turn than to the original creative force behind the first game,” he said.

“The first place we turned was to American and American shared a passion for the IP and he’s had eight years to think about it.”