EA Asked for 'Sexy' Alice, So the Dev Put Dildos on a Snail

When EA's marketing team asked Spicy Horse Games to "make things more sexy" during the development of Alice: Madness Returns, creator American McGee didn't argue. He pasted dildos onto the head of a giant snail and emailed the image straight to them. They never asked again.

McGee shared the story in a thread on X on April 23, detailing the friction between his creative vision and what EA's marketing department wanted from the 2011 sequel. "The marketing team felt strongly that a Hard M title focused on gore, horror, and featuring a 'psychotic' Alice was what audiences would respond to best," he wrote. "I did NOT want to portray Alice as a psycho, cover her in blood, or 'make things more sexy.'" The dildo snail email, he says, shut that line of feedback down permanently.

What gave McGee the to push back wasn't stubbornness alone. Alice: Madness Returns was financed not by EA but through a Los Angeles bank using a bond finance deal, similar to how Hollywood movies get funded. As long as Spicy Horse, McGee's Shanghai-based studio, stayed on schedule and within budget, it retained complete creative control. The only hard constraint was sticking to the design and script submitted at the end of pre-production. "For the entire project, we never missed a milestone," McGee wrote. "And as a result, we could say 'no' to any and all requests or demands from EA."

This kind of arrangement is almost unheard of in games, and it's a shame it still is. Publishers meddling with creative direction is one of those perennial industry problems that rarely gets talked about this openly, so I appreciate McGee just laying it all out. The deal did have a cost, though. When the team needed an extra 30 to 60 days for polishing at the end of development, McGee says EA refused, "probably a bit out of spite." The game shipped on time and on budget, but without that final layer of polish.

McGee framed the whole experience as historic. "Madness Returns wasn't just the first AAA game fully developed by a Chinese team," he wrote. "It was also the first ever game to be bond financed in China. We were also the first team ever to tell EA [go f**k yourself] and (kinda) get away with it." Alice: Madness Returns launched in June 2011 for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360, and while it didn't set the world on fire critically, it's built a dedicated cult following in the years since. McGee has attempted to get a third Alice game off the ground, but the franchise remains dormant.