One led to a movie where Jeff Goldblum gets beat up by a tyrannosaurus while the other inspired centuries of strange little girls like me hosting tea parties for their eyeless teddy bears – but Jurassic Park and Alice in Wonderland have an important connection through the former’s creator, Michael Crichton. Without him, ex-Doom developer American McGee may have never made the Alice action game in 2000 that, 26 years later, still represents one of publisher EA’s most beloved series.
“I can’t say that, looking back on my childhood, that I remember or recall being the world’s biggest Alice in Wonderland fan,” McGee admits to YouTuber Tucker Hazell in a new episode of his Dev Dive interview series. McGee enjoyed Lewis Carroll’s 1865 bedtime tale about following the White Rabbit into dreamland, where a bite of cake makes you tall before the Queen of Hearts slices your throat. But he says, “I really had to be hit over the head by coincidence, and other people kind of bringing it to me. and making mention of it multiple times before it clicked in my head, like, ‘Duh, I should make a game out of this, right?'”
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“I think one of my initial reasons for kind of dismissing it was that, ‘Well, that’s for kids,'” he explains. “I don’t want to do something so light-hearted.”
McGee had just been fired from Quake developer id Software in 1998, but then he got “hit by the lightning of luck” a few times and “somehow got, you know, this mysterious phone call from Michael Crichton, which ends up dragging me into his world. And then that parlays into getting a job at EA,” where McGee says he once got into a “Quake death match” with late actor Robin Williams.
“You know, I’m hanging out with Marilyn Manson for Christ’s sake,” McGee blurts. “I want to do something, you know, a little bit darker, more edge.”
But Alice ignored the blaring shock rock music and kept knocking. “At some point,” says McGee, “it percolated, and it stewed in my head long enough, […] and it kind of crystallized almost immediately as this dark, gothic, psychological exploration set in the world of Wonderland.”
McGee still doesn’t consider himself an Alice in Wonderland expert. He says the first Alice game was made to be “a line in history where you think you know Alice in Wonderland from the books, but I’ve just burned down her house and killed her family.”
I, however, identify myself as a steward of all Alice nonsense, and as a hardcore fan of both Carroll’s original books and American McGee’s Alice games, I believe they all contain an admirable, grotesque sentimentality. Like rabbit foot taxidermy. However, perhaps unfortunately for the late Michael Crichton, there aren’t any dinosaurs…
Alice Madness Returns creator American McGee is making a spiritual successor, and he’s not worried about EA: “There’s a kind of obvious overlap, but not one that gets us in trouble with the lawyers.”
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