The designer behind the first two Alice games, American McGee, has announced that he has secured Virtuos Team to develop Alice: Asylum but needs money and support from EA.
Taking the Alice in Wonderland fairy tale and making it as twisted as possible was always a cool premise, and with American McGee’s Alice and Alice: Madness Returns, designer American McGee saw that vision come to reality, even with ten years between the first two titles.
Now seeing another 10+ years go by, McGee continues to try to get support for a new sequel, with Alice: Asylum being previewed via the designer’s blog and Patreon. While the cult classic has certainly received a lot of fan support, the project may still need a few big dominoes to fall before development can begin in earnest.
One of those dominos does appear to have fallen, with American McGee announcing he has secured the services of the Virtuos Team to take on development for the project. Most known for co-development on several projects, such as The Outer Worlds, Outriders, Dark Souls: Remastered, BioShock: The Collection, and more, the for-hire studio makes a lot of sense.
“The culmination of our team’s efforts on the first pre-production phase of Alice: Asylum, (Alice’s potential third video game adventure) is now contained within the completed Alice: Asylum Design Bible,” says McGee in a new Patreon post where this book is being used as a “sales tool” to “encourage official greenlighting of the development of a new AAA Alice 3 video game, by key stakeholders at Electronic Arts (EA).”
Currently, the team calculates that the game will require a development budget of $50 million, not including marketing or additional licensing and miscellaneous costs to release and publish the game fully. From here, the final domino would seem to be EA’s support, as they still hold the licence to all Alice games, as well as the funding that American McGee hopes will also come from EA.
So far, it’s unclear if EA will respond or has any interest in the project, especially since Alice: Madness Returns was released in 2011—over ten years ago. Considering the more recent build-up in the hype over the project, and potential film or TV releases still being discussed for the Alice franchise, one would hope that EA could give the green light for another of its dormant properties in Alice.
