Want To Make Games? Here's 1 Hour Of Brutal Honesty From A Game Dev Legend (American McGee)

I remember specifically, this memory has burned into my brain. I was 10 years old and I was walking alone in the Walmart gaming section. Do you remember the Walmart gaming section? And you had all the box art for the PC games. And this one PC game box art caught my eye. It was called American McGee's Alice. Something inside of me was permanently planted. A seed. This dark gothic aesthetic of a fairy tale. That seed was It was It was so weird. But it was it was comforting to me and I felt weird cuz like I grew up in the Bible belt in a very conservative household and I'm not complaining. I had a great family. But this dark aesthetic was really enticing to me and it was just strange. It was unique. It was fresh. [music] And frankly, this game and the sequel Alice Mattis Returns, they've inspired my own work ever since. From Pinstripe to Never Song to my next game, Twisted Tower, my games have clearly drawn inspiration from American McGee. from that one moment. And I always wondered, who is

who is this American McGee dude? Is he some famous rich jerk? [music] After all, his name is plastered all over his games, and he's honestly a legend at this point in the gamedev community. Or is he humble? Is he kind? Well, I think by the end of this podcast, you're going to find out what I did. American is honestly one of the wisest, kindest, and most downto-earth gamedev legends you're ever going to meet. See, this podcast is quite frankly one of my top five conversations I've ever had. But I'm being serious right alongside Ken Lavine. In this podcast, we we get honestly really raw and honest and it was such an easy conversation to have. We discuss why making games is so difficult and timeconuming. Why Alice [music] Mattis Returns still holds up today. How the Alice games were even made. The pros and cons of working in the AAA industry. Why making Alice was totally different than typical EA games. How to lead a game project whether it's indie AAA and what exactly happened to the third installment of [music] the Alice franchise. And at the end we blast through a ton of questions that you guys

asked. You asked so many questions to American on [music] X and uh I try to ask as many of these as I can to American. This is a heartfelt conversation and I highly recommend you sit through the entire thing. You're going to be blessed blessed by American McGee. Let's go. Can I ask what the budget for Alice Madis Returns was?
Yeah. So the total on that was about $20 million. That included development and some portion of the marketing budget and some other expenses, but it was 20 million US. How how what's the play time on that? Uh,
you know, it depends on how you play it. I've seen people speedr running through it in eight hours and I've seen other people take, you know, 20 hours. Uh, I when I played it on stream, I was playing, you know, an hour at a time and it took me months to get through it, right? So,
I'm sure you were commenting on everything, you know.
Yeah.
Well, okay. And the reason I ask is cuz like um how much do you think Alice Mannis Returns would cost to make for an indie development team right now in this day and age with let's say AI? I know

you mentioned earlier in the podcast you you're you're not really familiar with a lot of game development stuff or or whatever. Um because it's been how long has it been since you you actually worked on a game?
Yeah, it's been I mean I think we're going on 10 years now.
10 years. I'm wondering if if Alice Madness Returns these days, not to discredit the game, it's incredible. It's one of the best games ever made. I wonder if it could be made for like 3 million bucks. What do you think?
I don't think so. And the reason is that if you break down where the money was spent on development for that game, the majority of it went to art asset production. So, unless you were going to commit to AI art asset production, I I don't see how you're going to get a cost savings out of that.
What about assets like that you could buy? They're too unique. They're too like uh
Yeah, I know. They were too unique. I mean, you look at the game, you know, I could imagine that if you were going to suggest this was maybe a World War II tank simulation, you know, kind of war war game where a bunch of assets have

been done already and not a lot of original stuff has to be created that maybe you could get that kind of cost savings in there. But for something like Alice Madness Returns, you know, the the level of originality in the assets would make that sort of thing. Well, I mean, it depends because you could feed in to an AI all this stuff and make and tell it, you know, make original assets. And by the way, I don't want people saying, "No, you can't. It doesn't work." I I'm not I'm not saying that. I'm saying in a in a perfect world where AI works perfectly to create art, I suppose you could. But I I don't actually know because I have no experience with that. I I know that there's some rudimentary 3D model generation thingies out there. I've used them with my 3D printer um to generate simple models just as a test and then 3D print those models.
But for game development, I I don't know. But back to the original point that I would make about this is that the majority of the budget for the production of that game went into art asset production. 3D 3D assets, 2D textures, animations, all that kind of

stuff. The programming team on on madness returns was less than 10 people and
wow as with all such teams there were like two or three guys who were just stellar who did the the bulk the core of all of the really important stuff and the rest of the guys were like integration and cleanup and minor functions and stuff like that. So I I don't know that also that AI would have been able to solve some of the difficult problems that were solved to make medicine returns what it was. Soam for example the hair physics right we had to have a really really smart guy work on the hair physics so that it worked and it was optimized and it worked in all ca all edge cases and things like that. And to this day, people look at the hair physics in Madness Returns and they're like, "Holy crap, that's amazing. That's as good as anything else that's out there right now." Like current current gen games. For a lot of the other stuff, I think, you know, AI coding could probably do a lot of the lifting and you could even imagine that, you know, you hand that stuff over to the level designers and the integrators and they

could work on that kind of thing, right? Um, but yeah, the main the main budget was art. So, I don't know that you could do it cheaper. And and just to compare, we did go out to a big development studio here in Shanghai and say, "Look, what would it cost to do full stack development on Alice Asylum?" And they came back with a budget of $50 million. And you know, $50 million for that kind of like large AAA console game is not that expensive in today's world. I've seen people online, you know, suggesting that the fact that we asked for $50 million to make that game was the reason why EA said no. Uh I just want to make clear to those people that we actually had potential investors lined up to to foot the bill. So it was never a question of you know budget or what these guys these developers did in terms of proposing to make the game.
So this this design bible was this Omry Caresh? Um do you know Omry?

Of course I know Omry. He produced a lot of the art for the for it. But I mean when you say was this Amry Kesh that that's kind of does sentence doesn't make any sense. So we had a team of lots of artists uh who worked on this. Omry was one of those artists and there was you know uh Alex Crowley was the guy who was doing like the layout for the uh the book the PDF and he was doing art as well. Uh we had Joey working on this. We had a bunch of other artists working on this and you know it was a multi-year multi-person massive you know endeavor to get this done.
The design bible.
The design bible. Yeah.
Bro, what a shame. I'm sure I know you probably don't want to drudge this up, but it's it it is hard to see this.
I mean I it is and it isn't. You know, I I never allowed myself to have very high expectations for the outcome. I just focused on the task. And for me and for

the team and for the fans, I constantly reminded them that we did not know where this was going to go and that I was simply thankful for the opportunity to do the work to outline this because there is a main thing for me is there's a story there and I wanted to finish the story that the Alice series um lives perfectly with this third chapter finishing out you know her journey and kind of explaining a lot of what the journey was uh prior
and I think it turned out absolutely fantastic. And if it ever gets made into a game, great. If it doesn't, if it only ever lives as this presentation that outlines what what that story is and where that character goes, um that to me is still an amazing achievement. Like I'm glad that we got to cap off the the third part of the story.
Yeah. Well, hey, let's let's um let's sort of back up a little bit. Are you cool if we talk a little bit about Alice

Manage returns the production side? Because I kind of want to I want to make sure that we clarify why the art assets are so expensive.
And also I want to figure out exactly what your role in this was in this game and and any advice you have, things you learned about the production of this game. Um so are you cool if we talk about that?
Yeah, of course.
Okay. because I know you probably talk about Madness Returns all the time and I can't imagine how annoying that is, you know, 10 years after you've made a game and um especially with plushy dreadfuls being so successful. So, as an olive branch to you, I want to say link is in the description to to everyone, please buy a plushy dreadful um just to support American and and to say thank you for coming on the podcast. So, I just want to say that before we jump into Alice, if you're cool with having a link in the description. Yeah, no worries.
Cool. Um, okay. So, to start off, why I want to like first I want to explain why I want to talk about Atlas Mattis

Returns kind of for the next maybe 20 minutes. Um, for me the before I even watched, let's say before I even watched a Tim Burton movie, um, which I think the first one I saw was probably Edward Scissor Hands and I was probably 10 before I saw any Tim Burton movie. I remember walking through Walmart in like it had to be 1999 or something and seeing the first Alice box game. uh on the Walmart shelves and I felt guilty looking at it because I I I grew up in the I'm still in the Bible belt, you know, grew up in in in a very um like conservative household. So seeing that it was really enticing. I was like, what is that? Because it felt so backwards, you know, because you're just not used to that with a a fairy tale like Alice. So I saw that and I dude, that memory is burned into my brain and um since then that's my

career. My career has been Gothic fairy tale games. I'm on my third one. No matter how hard I try to make something that's commercial, it's not that Gothic isn't commercial, it's just a harder cell. Um, no matter how hard I try to get away from that, I always end up going back to the Gothic fable. Always with every project. And so, credit to you. Credit to um Ken Lavine for for, you know, me leaning into some Bioshock aesthetic as well. So, I just wanted to tell you that and say thank you for for inspiring game developers like me and that's my reasoning for wanting to jump into these questions. So, I just wanted to tell you that. Um so, thank you. Um, and if if there's anybody listening right now and they were inspired by Americans work, please leave a comment below just encouraging him. Um, okay. So, my question for you about American or not American McGee, about Alice Mattis

Returns is what was your job? I know you were creative director, but what does that mean?
So, I was creative director on that project. I was also running the development studio at uh Spicy Horse. And you I guess that the first thing about the job was helping to build that studio. So I I moved first I left the US and I moved to China and I built a game studio from the ground up uh with help from GameTap who funded the Grim American McGee Grim game
that that gave us the ability to build really big fast you know games using the Unreal Engine. Um, and and like with Madness Returns, during that process, I was, you know, writing story and I was kind of directing gameplay and managing the team and managing the studio. Uh, by the time Madness Returns ha happened, you know, the first step was pitching EA was coming up with, hey, we're here in Shanghai. We can offer you this, this,

this in terms of business, uh, in terms of the structure of the deal. That's obviously very important to them. It took a year to get that deal done. And so for a year, I worked on the contract. I worked on the the financing model. I worked on outlining what that game was going to be. And they did a really complicated financing model. It's a bond finance model similar to what's done with films. Um, so when you make a movie in Hollywood, a lot of times there's a bond company that comes in and pays the money to the production
and they're backed by a bank and then the movie company provides collateral for that financing. Um, so if the whole thing falls apart, but the bond company's basically in there saying, "Hey, we're going to act as the buffer between the developer or the guys shooting the film and the studio." So the studio can't go in there and make all kinds of ridiculous demands on the production team or in this case so that the publisher can't come in and say, "Hey, we're going to disrupt your whole development so that you produce an EA or

an E3 uh demo outside of the scope of what we originally agreed to and then we're going to later on blame you for slipping your milestones, right? Or or spending too much or whatever." So um
can I can I ask you something really quick about that?
Yeah, I am.
I'm sorry to interrupt. I I'm just curious. Why would EA want to sign a deal like that if it favors you?
So because it meant that they didn't have to book the spending as a part of their financial reporting. They managed by doing that they essentially got a game made financially. It appeared invisible right to their stock to their stock price to their shareholders instead of them spending a certain amount of money every month for two years to make a game. Nothing appeared on the books. They only booked what was spent on the game at the moment where they had to repay the the bond. And that only happened once we delivered the game. So, as soon as they booked that,

they also then were able to record all the income from the game selling. So, it was like this immediate offset of, hey, we spent $20 million to make this. Oh, guess what? We made $20 million to offset it. So, as far as
Yeah. Now, I I would say that my my read on on how that played out for EA though was they were not happy ultimately with the fact that they were not given the kind of control over us as a developer as they would normally have enjoyed because they did in fact come to us and say, "Hey, out of the blue, can you guys make an E3 demo for us?" And I was like, "No." [laughter]
And
that's great. Good for you. Well, you know, we can laugh about it now, but I'll tell you that towards the end of the project, I ended up in a situation where the team came to me and said, "Look, we've managed this whole thing beautifully. We're on time. We're on schedule, budget. Everything's gone really well, but we really need one more month to do po to do polishing."

And we couldn't just do that. We didn't have the money to just do that. So, I went back to EA and said, "Hey guys, uh, could we get an extra month? It's going to make the game that much better." and they were like, "No." [laughter] So, so I mean, it did come back in the end to bite us in the butt.
Um, but I would say,
so there there's 30 more days that could have that we're missing from Alice Madness Returns.
Yeah. I mean, that's one of the reasons why the game in my opinion feels bloated. What I what I wish we'd had was an extra 30 days to trim down the game.
I'm so glad you said that, man. I feel that way right now. I I'm so glad you said that. It makes me encouraged because that's all I'm doing right now with my own game. It's just cutting and cutting and cutting. I'm like, what am I doing?
Yeah.
But I hope it's the right thing to do. Um
it always is.
It always is. Doesn't matter what you're making. Uh you know, simplification as the final step is a really important thing to uh to do.
Uh but so anyway, back to your question.

So that first year, uh I was very focused on business development. I was very focused on getting that deal done and getting getting the deal in place so we could make the game. U and at the same time I was working with my longtime creative partner R.J. Berg to define what was the game because a part of the bond financing concept is that you have to set out on paper very clearly what it is you're producing so that you can f follow that as your milestone guideline as you're as you're building the product. And you're not allowed to deviate from that [snorts] without consensus by all parties involved. The bank, the bond company, EA, us, everybody has to sit down and say, "Hey, we're going to make changes to this and everybody's going to going to agree on it." So, we had to have in place a technical design document, you know, narrative, creative design document, all all this stuff had to be done. So, for the first year while we were getting the deal done, we were also working on all those design, creative technical documents. And that work actually continued into the first six months of

development where we were on the hook to create a vertical slice. And then the vertical slice also came with further development documents related to tech and art and you name it, right?
Can you define vertical slice for the audience really quick? I mean what what specifically what you made? Was it a demo or what? It's like a fiveminute demo or
Yeah. Yeah. It's a it's a play it's a playable demo. It's a proof of concept would be the way the best way to say it. And Okay. Um yeah so we we built this proof of concept to show that hey we have the technical technical uh expertise we have the production pipeline in terms of art production all these things are here and um so we did that and and then once that milestone is passed you then continue on into full-blown production you know gated milestones deliverables you name it right and when you're doing it via a bond finance mechanism you have the bond company there saying this milestone is due on this date and must contain these things. And so uh we we built a very

good system of you know production methodology. you know, we we had a producer, executive producers, and all kinds of tools related to tracking every individual working on the project down to 30 minute segments of time and making sure that everybody was operating in lock step, getting all the content produced and, you know, getting everything into the game. And and I mean, I have to say like I I'm super proud of that team. Um, you know, we had a 100 people on the inside of the studio and another 200 people on the outside doing all the uh external art outsourcing, producing all those art assets. So, total team size was around 300 people and my if you come back to this question of what was my job um basically I tried to be the guy somewhere at the top of that stack with a couple of other people who were also you know animation lead,

tech lead, production lead, art lead. Those were the people I sat with every single day to do reviews of the content that's been produced and where we were in terms of our milestones and making adjustments as needed. Um making sure everything was on track and you know I I had to kind of bounce between um mana managing and working with EA uh marketing you know production story stuff um you name it. So, I I was kind of all over the place. Um I guess as would be expected for somebody in that role. Um
but yeah, I I do just really want to stress um it's obviously a massive team operation. And and one of the things that's always been a little bit frustrating for me by virtue of how my name ends up on these boxes is that people think, oh, you know, this guy must be a massive jerk because he sticks his name on the box. Um,

no, I don't think so, man.
Well,
it's just part of it's part of the brand. It helps sell it, you So, but like I you know I take every opportunity to make it very clear that I I think that beyond my setting out some of the the narrative stuff and and sort of the guidelines for what the product is going to be. Um I feel like these products, the Alice products, they tell their story, if you listen carefully to the to the character and to the world, they tell their story to the creators very well. to me, to the art team, to the tech team, when you sit down to work on one of these things, it speaks to you. And I say that because I believe that if you deleted me from the equation, like with the asylum stuff, if you deleted me from the equation and you gave that design bible to some, you know, a team of people, they would be affected by the spirit of the thing and they would make it happen, right? So, I

I feel like, you know, I I do everything I can to keep things on track as the as the games are getting made. Um, but my role in that stuff is not super critical. So long as you have really good art director, animation director, tech director, all those people in place, it it obviously, you know, 300 people, it's a massive team operation to get these things done. And, you know, when you say, "Well, what did you do?" Um, I just held on for [laughter] dear life.
Can I ask you uh how long how long did the project take?
Two years.
Okay. Um,
well, three years if you count the the one year I spent on the business development side of things and getting getting everything set up.
So, let's can we sh let's talk about that. The game the pitching to publishers world is foreign to a lot of people listening right now. It's not foreign to me. I've never pitched to EA. Um, but I I've pitched

I've signed three publisher deals and so I know that world, but I am very curious about pitching to EA and what that's like. Um, because we're talking 20 times to 40 times the the budget of a typical indie game, $20 million. So, what's that pitching process like? in in in developing that.
So, I sadly my story with all of this is I don't have an answer because both times with my experience um with EA, it's been magical nonsense. I I was fired from ID. I got hired by EA. There there's some stuff that happened in the middle. Um I went to North Carolina, worked with Michael Kiteon on a project. Um, you know, but eventually I got I got pulled into EA and after being there for about a year, they some uh the Rich Hillman, which is um you know, one of

the execs uh at EA, uh he came to me, he was like, "Hey, American, uh you seem to be not doing much over there, you know, where we currently have you working. How would you like to work on your own game?" Um this came totally uninvited. I I didn't ask for it. I didn't expect it. Uh, but you know, thank you Rich and and the rest of the EA Exec team for having faith in me, you know, out of the blue. But I mean, it was literally like I was hit by lightning, right? And they they came and said, you know, do you want to make something? So, I did have to pitch and I and I eventually came up with this concept of the Gothic Alice, you know, a retelling of Alice and basing that heavily on my own personal experience, childhood and traumas and things like that.
And they said yes. Um, that
this was the first Alice, right? This was the first.
That was the first Alice. That pitch was done with like a I don't know 20 page word document with some rough sketches [laughter] of what the
That's great. I love that.
For the second goound for Madness

Returns, I remember reaching out to them. I remember making a little bit of a pitch. Uh I don't they I feel like they said yes pretty quickly and I think a lot of that came back to John Ricatello who was the CEO of EA at that time and he and I had known each other when I was there you know back on the first Alice game and he was always a big fan of Alice and so it was yet another one of these situations where it was like hey you know we're over here in China we could make a game on you know relatively lesser budget but super high quality and would you guys like another Alice game and they were like yeah okay you So, um, so that's great.
I don't I don't Yeah, I don't know that that's very helpful.
So, was your was the team who made Alice Mattis Returns I'm sorry if this is a dumb question, but were they Chinese?
Majority of them were Chinese. Sure.
Okay. Would you say that would you say that Chinese culture is influential in the Alice games?
Uh, well, I mean, there's a section of the game which which is influenced by uh

Chinese history and culture uh for sure in in Madness Returns. That's the section where there's a kind of Chinese vibe, but then you've got the Japanese samurai wa wasps coming in there and murdering everybody. [clears throat]
I remember that. But what about what about just um I'm trying to figure out why Alice sticks out like a sore thumb. It just it it almost doesn't fit into the game industry. It just feels like it shouldn't have been made. And I I wonder if if that's because of the the team not being like a typical American team. I don't know. I mean, it it might have been that the cultural separation, the divide um created a kind of a kind of rarified atmosphere. I I mean when we started this thing up, I got to tell you, the team were were like amped like crazy because this was going to be the first time that a Chinese predominantly Chinese team was going to get a full development budget to create a Western

AAA game from start to finish.
That's cool.
So, I I feel like that they felt like they had something to prove and a lot of them were big fans of Alice. uh there at that time. So when I first came to China, what I saw was a distinct lack of independent game studios, independent um game creatives in general. When I first came to China 21 years ago, uh the landscape was almost entirely 3D outsource or 2D outsource production for western games. So that meant you had giant
uh industrial factories for art content being directed by western game developers basically telling them, "Hey, produce all these art assets for our World War II, you know, war simulator game or whatever." So there was very little ability for them to express creatively. They were given a brief and they were expected to follow the brief. Right? When I came along, when we started Spicy Horse, I initially, I

mean, immediately set out, I was like, "Everybody's going to get creative autonomy. We're going to work on, you know, interesting things that's not, you know, tanks and guns." And because of that, and because people knew the Alice games and they kind of knew a little bit about me, we managed to attract a lot of really high-end talent who were like, "Yay, you know, I want to get away from working on run-of-the-mill games. I want to work on different stuff." And when we made the announcement that we were going to do Mattis Returns, man, it was like it was like ringing the dinner bell. Like everyone just [laughter] came running, you know, all of the best animators and all of the best artists and all of the best programmers came running from all over China like, "Yeah, we're going to make our own AAA major western, you know." So, I mean, it was it was like magic. That's why I'm saying like if you deleted me from that, if if I had finished the outline of all the story and you know the the the kind of general outline that was necessary for the Bond company and then you deleted me, I still think that team would have made an absolutely incredible game cuz for them there was a lot on the line of

proving themselves. Let's pretend you're right that if you deleted you, the game would be fine. I don't believe you, by the way, but let's pretend you're right. What is the one thing that would be removed that you're like, "Yeah, that was that was an important part of that game." Like, it's really what I'm asking is like what was your forte as the leader of
So, I'll tell you what I did a lot of was protecting the game from nonsense, protecting Alistister. So, um, we got a lot of requests from the marketing team at EA for us to turn the game into like a maniacal bloody super horror slasher like
Yeah, I know. Well, so so that was a lot of what I did. And and they also um there's a famous story that goes around where like they came to me asking for us to make her more sexy. They they wanted her to have a shorter skirt. You know, famously in the first go around on the first Alice game, there was an EA exec who came to my office and was like,
"Oh, so what happens if you you know, you turn the camera and you look up her

skirt?" And I'm like, "You get punched in the face. Get the out of my office." You know, like 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? You know, like get the out.
So, how old is Alice in this game?
Well, that's that's another really relevant question in all of this, right? [laughter]
So, golly,
if you if you ask me that question, I'll tell you, you know, at one point during the production on Maddie Return, somebody came along and said, "Could we make her boobs bigger? Could we make her sexier?" And in response, I photoshopped one of the snails out of the veils of Veil of Tears, but put a penis on its head and emailed that back to them. And I was like, "So, you want to do some stuff like this? Is this where we're going? What what's what are you trying to do here?" Um, and they stopped asking me that question. And then, you know, there was another instance where they were trying to push the, you know, she needs to be a maniac, she needs to be a serial killer, she needs to I was like, "Hey guys, no, no, no, we're not doing

that." and I had to kind of re-educate them on what it is that the story is about, you know, what it is that we're doing here. And I think to this day, a lot of people still don't understand just how dark that story is.
Yeah.
They don't understand what is at the core and the stakes of the story, right? It's it's really dark. It's also very personal to me. Um, so anyway, you know, back to your question, if I hadn't been there, if you deleted me at some point, I fear that they would have pushed it in that direction and uh that that wouldn't have been good. I love what you said. Um, I think that there there's a word not to compare anything I've done to what you've done, but I I you you inspired me a ton, right? And so what people tend to say about my Gothic fairy tale games is that they're hauntingly beautiful. So there's like a contrast, right? Haunting and beautiful.

There's innocence and guilt. There's these two contrasting ideas. And that's what a fable is, right? A fable is is especially like a grim or a grim's fairy tale is it's very innocent and very dark.
That's correct. And that contrast is is critically important.
Absolutely. So if these executives, which they clearly know nothing about what a fable is,
they come in there and they say, "Well, let's just make the whole thing guilty."
Dark and Y.
Yeah.
She's got huge boobs, so she's super sensual. And then you've got blood everywhere.
That's right.
Where's the fable? It's gone.
That's right. Where's the contrast?
Yep. Yep.
So, and that's what Plushy Plushy Dreadful, again, link in the description. Buy a Plushy Dreadful. Uh, that's what makes Plushy Dreadful marketable at all, which is they're plushies, but they're dark, right? So, you have that that mix. And it's so frustrating because
I feel like this [sighs] it's frustrating to me. Um, this yin and yang is is often times missing

uh from Western games. That's why it's hard for me to even think of Alice as a Western game because I'm like, it just doesn't fit into Western games in my mind,
right? Um, western games are they they're so monotone.
Um, there's not that really dark contrast. What's funny is whenever I would do a trade show or something and like people would play my stuff, you know who never really played my games was Americans, [laughter] right?
It was always I don't know I don't know if this is offensive or not, but it was always Asian or Hispanic that loved my games.
And I can't put a finger on it. I don't know why that is. Um, but all that said, that brings me to my next question, which is sometimes I wonder if this gothic fairy tale aesthetic, which I don't plan on abandoning in my career. I'm probably going to make another one and another one and another one. Is it marketable anymore to do this stuff in the video game industry to make a game?

Let's pretend a Dark Oz game. I think you were going to do something like that or you tried to. I've thought about that, too. Uh, some kind of dark fairy tale. Is it is it marketable and a and a commercially good idea to do this anymore?
I Well, first of all, I don't know. I mean, if I if I had the magic answer for what's marketable and what's not, you know, I'd be super rich by now. Um I you know, I obviously make mistakes creatively um in trying to anticipate the market or anticipate, you know, I don't know. So, for me, this really just comes back to why am I telling the stories I tell? I don't really think like is this marketable or is it not? I simply tell stories that I can wake up in the morning and feel energized to tell. And if I have to wake up in the morning and make a story that I'm not interested in, then it's hard to get out of bed. It's that simple.
Ken Lavine, he's working on a game called Judas. Have you seen Judas? I

know you aren't really.
Okay. Judas is kind of like Bioshock. Have you played Bioshock?
Of course. Yeah. [laughter] I'm not sure. I'm not sure when your son was born and you decided, was it your son or your daughter where you decided I'm not going to play games anymore?
Um,
it's not that I decided I'm not going to play them. It's just that life decided you don't have time to do this anymore.
I have three. I have three. Believe me, I know. I know. Um
but no, I played the first Bioshock. I think I played it twice. In fact, I absolutely loved it. Yeah,
he he's Go ahead. I'm so sorry.
Oh, no. I think we even put the we put one of the characters uh into Oh, no. We tried to put one of the characters into Madness Returns. Ken said yes and the lawyer said no.
Of course, the lawyer said no. That's sad.
Anyway, that's why I love that game because I tried to put one of the What are the big brothers? The the big robot thing. Yeah, dude. We had the asset. We put it into the game. Ken was like, "This is cool. Let's do it." And then the lawyer's like, "Yeah, no, you can't do that."
Oh, man. That's a great idea, though.

Anyway, he was on the podcast and he was talking about how his next game Judas has taken 10 years, you know, and I have a a fun little hypothetical for you or like a would you rather would you rather spend 10 years on a game that you love or one year on a game that you hate and and both are profitable. Both are very profitable.
Uh yeah, I mean at this point I I just quit, right? I mean I I took the [laughter] I took the third option which is that I retired because I got tired of I got tired of these kind of moral conundrums because that basically does become your life like you are constantly forced to make these kinds of decisions and um
what sacrificing your creative integrity is that what you mean?
Yeah. But also just finding the balance between starving and eating versus making something that you want versus not versus like all of the interpersonal

stuff that you have to balance and manage. Um at some point you just kind of say like I I don't want to make these decisions anymore. I I don't want to be constantly having to make these decisions. And you know it's kind of a copout but I did it for 30 years. I I played the politics for 30 years. I made those decisions for 30 years. Uh at some point you just say like I'm done playing. I I'm that's enough. I'm done playing.
Was it Do you remember the straw that broke the camel's back when you were just sick of it?
Yeah. No, it was it was at the end of the cycle for Spicy Horse. We had taken on investment and the the investors wanted us to leverage our tech stack into making free-to-play games and this was fairly early in the free-to-play cycle. So there was still a lot a lot of push back on freetoplay mechanics. Like people were just crap all over me
and they were saying how dare you and

this is the worst thing ever and you're the freaking devil. And I'm like guys the whole rest of the world is embracing this. Like this was super huge still super huge here in China you know. So, I was caught between this kind of cultural divide of like where we were based geographically and what we were seeing was the emerging new thing and then a bunch of people out there saying you're you're the devil for doing this. Anyway, um in
this online was this online people were mad at you online.
Online multiplayer mobile games is what
No, I mean on social media were people mad at you?
Yeah. Yeah, sure.
You got like nasty nasty comments and stuff? Yeah. Yeah, of course. Sellout and hack and all the garbage related to freeto play and you know, fair enough. I mean, but and fair enough because part of what burnt me out was the exposure to the realities of the free-to-play business, right? And that was seeing people who didn't really have the means

to afford it blowing tons of money on these essentially gambling mechanics, right? Um it was the interactions with our investors where like you know they were kind enough to continue floating us money but in some degree uh it was it was exactly what you just said would you how many you know how many years will you take free money doing something you don't want to do and it was exactly that that question
and the other part of it was the competition part of it where we we started to discover that the competition amongst the freeto mobile publishers or just publishers in general was like disgusting. Like you couldn't believe the kinds of things they were doing for, you know, stealing uh your players and messing with your marketing spending and, you know, trying to undermine your communities and like doing all of this stuff to try to destroy anything that you were trying to build. It it was just like soul destroying. You're just like,

God, you know, you got this whole segment of people who seem to be messing up their lives in order to play your game. You got a bunch of people who hate you for doing this. You've got your competitors trying to destroy you for it. You've got your investors sort of keeping you on life support, but never giving you enough to get past all these hurdles you see that might maybe, you know, be the roulette spin you need to rise above all the noise. But even if you manage to do that, do you want to you know do you [laughter] do you what does it mean to become successful in that space? So
were you were you married during all this?
Uh that was prior to getting married but I was with my partner. She we were together at that time. Yeah.
Did it and
she could see I was I was massively depressed like she she understood you know that it was absolutely draining the life out of me. And and it towards the end of that, I went to these investors who were gladly still dishing out lots of money. And I said, "I can't do this anymore. I I you have to stop giving us money. I don't want your money anymore.

I can't make this work. And if you can't find someone else to do this anyway, I'm I'm walking away. I'm done." And uh that finally was enough of a of a no from me that they were like, "All right, well, you know, we let it we let it shut down and uh you know, we take the loss." And but it sucked. It wasn't it wasn't fun. And that's what really it but it wasn't just that. It it it was that combined with what we'd gone through on Madness Returns and the sense of not not being able to achieve everything we wanted to there and and some of the stuff I've touched on about, you know, how that was structured and and sort of
the battles we had to fight and also how at the end of it it didn't turn out exactly like we wanted. And and again, this is where people are going to listen to this and like ah he's just, you know, complaining and moaning. I I want to be really clear. I don't think they will, man. I
I love my life. I'm happy for all of the trials and tribulations I've been through. I wouldn't be where I am right now today or who I am if it hadn't been for all of that. Uh I'm not suggesting that people shouldn't go walk through

their personal fires. You absolutely should. But back to your original question of like choose A or B and I'm just saying no. [laughter] I'm done. I'm done with that particular uh walk through fire. I've done that. [gasps] I wonder if um I wonder if one day I'll be in China too and I'll be on a podcast and I'll say the same thing. Obviously, I'm not um dealing with investment to to that degree and with shareholders and huge boardrooms and stuff, but I I am dealing with 3D Realms and um I've got a few point people there, point men that I talk to and we have discussions and get things can get stressful and budgets are tight. Actually, budgets don't exist anymore. I'm done with I've burned through the initial budget, so I I've got to just fund this thing on my own. But dude, it's exhausting. And um long conversations with my wife, you know,

and and evenings where I've got three kids jumping on me, and I've talked about this before, but I've got my three kiddos jumping on my shoulders, and in my head I'm just thinking about the game.
Yeah.
And I hate it.
That's really,
you know, it's really hard. It's like time is flying by
and um you're just exhausted. And I just wonder I wonder if you're right where it's like, hey, maybe maybe there's a point where you end you you finish you finish that part of your career and you move on to something else. I don't know.
So you you touched on the kids and I have to say um so my my son was born. He's now six years old. He just turned six in September. That was the cement on top of all of this. That was why when the asylum thing we finally got the response from EA that the kids that was the reason I came out and said, "Nah, I'm done. I'm retired." Um because, you know, I I had kids uh quite late. Uh my

daughter's three, my son is six and I'm 52. I'll be 53 next month. Um, so I like so much of my life now goes into my kids that if you ask me, do you want to go work on this or that or spend 18 hours a day working on No, I don't want to do any of that stuff. I want to spend time with my kids.
That's right.
And I I really enjoy spending time with my kids. And I know exactly what you're talking about where you're trying to have fun with them, but if there's something else going on in the world outside, you're being distracted by it. It really sucks because you feel really guilty and, you know, you feel distracted. I don't want that anymore. I I want to be able to focus on on my kids and focus on my family. And I'm very lucky with what we've built with Plushy Dreadfuls because it's being insanely successful. It's relatively stressfree and I get to work from home with my wife on that on that project, you know, day in day out. So, we we managed to find something, you know, knock on wood, that for right now really suits where I want

to be in life. And I I feel very blessed for that fact.
Yeah. If you're okay with this, we have a ton of questions on Twitter for you.
Sure.
Are you okay if we jump into those?
Yeah. Yeah, go for it.
How much time do you have?
Uh, we can go for maybe another 40 minutes or so until my voice gives out. I'm not used to talking this much anymore.
That's That's great. You're doing an amazing job. Okay. Uh, this is from Trappy Chan. The Design Bible for As I haven't read any of these, by the way, so I might read some dumb ones. The design bible for asylum is incredible but my question is actually have you been getting involved with some sort of series or film projects perhaps not Alice um as we know the EA issues but something else anything
I know so I also went through a whole period in life where I I tried to get involved in film TV stuff music video stuff you know ended up directing a few music videos I ended up selling a couple of films uh to like Jerry Brookheimimer and Disney and stuff like that so I mean I've been down that road I lived in LA for four years and it was the same thing where like towards the end of it I was just burnt out on it, annoyed by it. Um,

and so I I'm not really doing anything with that anymore. I am working on story stuff for Plushy Dreadfuls, which
is potentially the basis for someone else to go and do film and television or game stuff with it, but I I I'm just going to do the the basic outline stuff and then leave it to someone else.
And by the way, on the Alice stuff, I don't know if people know this, but like the rights for Alice are split in two. EA controls the game stuff and there's another entity, a business that controls the film and TV stuff and the film and TV stuff is dead as it has always been because the people that control that are incredibly unreasonable and not interested in actually getting anything made. I'm not going to go and say much more beyond that other than it's it's dead. So yeah,
you know, speaking of your your comment about Hollywood, um, so I sold the Pinstripe my my game Pinstripe. I sold those rights to uh and they're they're

they're fairly large studio now. They work with and um that's that's since expired, but uh Hollywood is funny. It they they like to blow smoke up your butt and they'll tell you, "Yeah, it's gonna happen. It's gonna happen. It's gonna happen. It's going to happen.
That's right.
And you go and you tell your wife, "Oh, this is happening. Oh my goodness, they found a
they found a director and he's about to sign on." And then you find out, nope, it's all BS.
It's all BS, dude. It's all What's that? It's turtles all the way down. I tell you what, media is bull all the way down.
It's a point where you just stop getting excited about this stuff because you realize that everyone's just blowing smoke. like games, film, TV, the whole thing is just blowing smoke. I constantly remind myself and my team of this that the only thing that we should care about are the things that we can physically do ourselves and make ourselves and that's it. Anything else that anybody's anybody's promising us, just ignore it. Just [laughter] just ignore it. So, [snorts] not to not to

get into my own stuff, I I'll shut up in a sec, but I made this whole Bible dude for this never a never TV show. This is the first time I've ever showing this. Once Apple bought my game Never Song, um, a director reached out and I won't say who it is, but he reached out. He was like, "Put together a design bible for me and we're going to sell this thing to Netflix." And I was like so excited. So, I put this whole thing together, this plot summary video. Dude, this thing is 11 minutes long.
Awesome.
With this,
this giant plot summary of this entire TV show. And I put this whole thing together. This was preai. and I put together all these like actors that could do great and nothing happened. Nothing. It's almost like I didn't even exist.
I'll tell you my experience with this is that the problem is that that industry is one where the writers who exist in the space who the studios bring on or the showrunners who get brought on, they

don't want you to have defined all that stuff. Correct.
They want to be able to redefine all that stuff so that they can claim the lead. writer credits, the lead creator credits, all that kind of stuff. And there's a rule in Hollywood that says that there's a certain percent that they have to crap on, I'm sorry, they have to change uh in order for it to be theirs. And so that's exactly what they'll do. I've seen it every single time that they've tried to make an Alice TV show or or film. These guys come in and they go, "Well, you know what? American did's interesting, but my idea is and then it [laughter] it's like what? That's not that's not Alice. my Alice at all and they don't care.
I got a phone call from from um the studio that was going to do the Pinstripe movie and Pinstripe is about a minister who goes to hell again. Innocence and guilt, right?
And they called me and they were like, "We're thinking of like getting rid of the minister angle."

Oh no.
And [laughter] I'm like, "So then, so it's just like
it's nothing. It's nothing. This is this is what they do. This is exactly what they do. I had I've had them call me up and be like, "Yeah, so we're thinking about setting your Alice story now in today's world." And she's going to have a boyfriend and I'm like, "What the what is that? That's not my Alice. Stop." And then no, they don't. And then they go and pitch that to somebody and that person is actually a fan of My Alice. And those people go, "What the hell is this? I don't want to buy this." [laughter]
And it happens over and over again. The Victorian flare is necessary. It's a necessary uh ingredient to the innocence of the Alice world. Like you have to have that beautiful almost childlike fairy tale vibe. If you get rid of the Victorian stuff,
what what's even there?
You know, these are the questions. [laughter]
Okay, let's move on to another question. I could talk about that all day, but let's see here. Uh what other IPs or

stories would you like to do your own version of? And it sounds like the answer is nothing.
Well, no, I'm doing them with plushy dreadfuls.
So, we have a whole line of plushies based on fairy tales. Uh Alice is in there, Red Riding Hood, uh you know, Women of Oz, and then we're also doing a bunch of cultural stuff and then there's the overarching story for Plushy Dreadfuls in general. So, I mean, I am working on story stuff, but it's within that space. Um, and by the way, you've highlighted Peter Pan. You can't touch Peter Pan because it's in this weird quasi public domain thing where you have to license it from this orphanage in the UK that were granted the rights. So, it's not something that I would go and mess with because of that.
Yep. Yep. Well, that's funny. That's a that's obviously then a perfect question because you've you've tried it. Are you happy the game is still being cared for by the fans or you think maybe if given the possibility you would like the game to have some parts by default in it? Do you know what that question's asking? I that I'm not sure, but I mean I of

course I'm happy to see that the community is still keeping the game alive and that Tik Tok to some degree is keeping the the game alive and you know I I do receive royalties from the sale of the game. So the the more people are out there playing the game
uh you know it's fantastic and I I just wish that people understood that I as much as I love all that stuff I don't have any direct control over that thing. I don't have like secret modding tools that I could release to people. I don't have secret versions of the game, uh, you know, that I could that I could give out. So, you know, I'm I'm just as in the dark about all that stuff as they are, other than the fact that I'm the creator of the game. That's it.
Am I allowed to ask you my own question here, which is, if you got the money for Asylum, would you want to make it? You can. You don't have to answer. You know, it's like I put out a video on this topic and I have to I have to maintain a fairly strong line on this because I get absolutely bombarded via email and social media all the time of people screaming at me, no, you know, don't give up and, you know, please keep

going. Um, I've already made it very clear that I'm done and that the the part that I would contribute to it is the design bible. That's the story and the whole outline for the game. And so whenever EA or whoever decides they want to make it, I'm already there. I'm in that document, right? So, I I can be left out of it and I think it'll be fine.
That's and that's great. That's that's what you want to do. So, what's one thing you want to be remembered for aside from Alice?
Look, all my focus these days is on my kids. So, I just want for my kids to remember me as a good dad because I didn't have a father in my life. And the the one time I met my father, my actual father, it was a disaster. It was a nightmare. And you know, growing up, I I was in a very poor family. I was in not the greatest of family situations. And so, you know, these days, like everything for me feels like it's been leading up to every morning, uh, giving my kids hugs and making breakfast for them and seeing them off to school. And

I'm absolutely loving that. And that's like that's the thing I want to be remembered for by my kids for having been there and been understanding and made a good breakfast and
yeah 3D 3D printed stuff with them and taught them you know how to read and all this other kind of stuff.
What do you think about the concept of a legacy? Um, to clarify, I've heard people who start businesses or they're directors or writers or game developers, they always talk about legacy, like they want to be remembered for a project they did. How do you how do you feel about that? Um, and how it compares to like having kids. I don't I don't really think about it. I mean, you could jokingly suggest that, you know, if you want to be remembered forever, do horrible things, right? because [laughter] it's really it's it's very difficult to be remembered for doing good, you know.
So, yeah, I I don't know. I don't normally chase that kind of stuff. It goes back to what we were talking about

before, which is that
um I like to work on the stuff I like to work on. I like to tell specific stories that resonate with something that's inside of me. And so, you know, I I don't think about the products or the projects themselves as part of that legacy. But you know there there is one thing is when I hear that people I worked with in the past or interacted with in the past um they were elevated by by the by virtue of my you know projects um that's how they got their inspiration or their start in the industry or whatever. That's to me a really good legacy. I like stuff like that that's meaningful because that's other people uh you know kind of passing it on and and making making the world a better place because of that kind of stuff.
Um Po Tater says, "What advice do you have for an aspiring game writer? I have no idea how to get my foot in the door."
Yeah, I you know, as far as this question of how to get into the industry, I have no idea. Um, when I was

hiring people back at Spicy Horse, a lot of times these were people who did not have any experience and I would just see a portfolio online. This is how I found, for example, Ken Wong. Uh, he had done a piece of Alice fan art. He had no experience in the industry whatsoever. I snatched him up, you know, brought him brought him to work. Uh, we had a great time working together and he's gone on to do some really incredible stuff. And and there's a lot of people in the history of my games of Spicy Horse um that the story has been exactly like that. I mean, I guess what that says is just try to get your stuff out there where it's seen. Um, which of course for writers is maybe harder to do. Uh, you know, I don't I don't know. I I wish I had a better answer for that, but um try to make yourself visible. You know, it's it's not easy. But that's the only thing I can think of.
I think writing is very hard. If there's anything that I can think of that's the hardest thing to be to get in the games industry, it's writing.
It's going to be tough. Yeah.
Yeah. very very tough because it's very

much also adjacent to the you know creative core of the game uh to the to the design of the game you know a lot of times the writers are one and the same as the designers or the creative directors
um so yeah it's it's not easy for me to suggest you know at that end of the spectrum you know that as you move towards that end of the spectrum the number of roles for those people get smaller and smaller and smaller so your chances of being recognized and brought in on something also become smaller Izzy says How did the creation of the Alice games help you overcome some of the most difficult aspects of your life?
Yeah, I mean so it's it's a really critical question because it's why I keep coming back to write these kind of stories. So I think a lot of people know you can go look at my Wikipedia uh my life, you know, from birth like from conception was not uh standard. I I guess you'd say it was quite difficult at times. And so that was where you know out of that darkness in childhood which included a lot of various types of abuse and trauma uh that's where this well of

knowledge, emotion, ideas comes from to feed these games. And it's always cathartic to be able to get those things out onto paper into a game, you know, to ultimately have the bad guy in the game run over by a train. Um, I felt that and I get people emailing me constantly to be like, "Man, that ending scene did so much to heal my trauma." And I'm like, "Yes, that's why it's in there." Um,
and and so my overcoming those things about my life is also linked to reading that the audience is using it in the same way. When I hear that people are healing, it helps to heal me and vice versa. I think when people see me healing, which is the creative output that I do, they in turn also heal, you know. So, um, it's it's been a really big deal and it's still ongoing, you know. It's still a big part of my creative process with with Plushy Dreadfuls. We're still exploring that that stuff. We're still exploring those

themes and those topics every day.
How Okay, this is a great question uh to end on, I think. How has it been transferring This will be the last question. How has it been transferring from the gaming industry to plushies?
Yes. So I I've kind of come over to the to the plushy thing with similar focus on quality of life, you know, for the people that are working on this and also trying to engage with the audience in a way that we did uh, you know, back when we were working on games. So yeah, I mean there's a lot of stuff about the work culture and design process and community that we've copy pasted over, but then there's a lot of stuff that's really different that I love. So for example, plushies don't get launched and then have bugs. [laughter] We don't have to do like we don't have to do testing, you know, in that sense. Um, you don't get, you know, plushies being incompatible with somebody's video card or some crap like that, right? So, there's something about making plushies. Uh, I can't say it's simple because we certainly have, you know, different

aspects of it that that have their complexities. Um, but it is obviously a lot more simple than than what we were dealing with on games. And for that, I like it. And um yeah, it's been a lot of fun. It's been very very very satisfying. Uh creatively, you know, when I get to work on the marketing stuff, I like that a lot. And then story-wise, I get to, you know, put elements of my story or elements of the customer stories or their uh medical or mental conditions into these plushes. It satisfied a lot of the same kind of itches that I had uh you know, I was I was addressing when we were making games.
Cool, man. Well, uh, link is in the description, guys, to purchase a plushie from American McGee. Um, I'll be buying two for my kiddos. Not a third for my my uh one-year-old daughter, I think. Not yet. May maybe she's a little bit older. I'll get So, because there are there any that are like not creepy?
Oh, for sure. Yeah. No, we we have some

now. Um, we just released one yesterday called Joy and I think we're releasing another one [laughter] called Echo where they are meant to just be like um mirror companion like they're not they're not sort of
contain any of the any of the story stuff like we do with a lot of them.
Oh, okay. I see. I'm I know I'm not sharing my screen, but I see the joy one. This one's perfect. Okay. Well, thanks for your time, American. That was awesome. Dream come true for me. Thank you. Great talking to you.