American McGee has been busy (since 2017) with the pre-production phase of his proposed follow up to 2011's Alice: Madness Returns. The third game in the series was going to be called Alice: Asylum, but after recent interactions with Electronic Arts McGee has admitted that: "Alice had a good run but the dream is over." McGee and a team of collaborators (artists, writers, designers, modelers and producers) have contributed to a massive Alice: Asylum Design Bible, and it was hoped that after many years of negotiations with EA, that the large chunk of presentation material would provide enough motivation for the publisher to sign up for a push into full development. The Alice: Asylum Design Bible was financed via fan contributions, through the Patreon crowd funding platform.

The publisher has decided to not finance the Asylum project, and will pursue other routes with the Alice intellectual property. McGee provided an update on the game's Patreon page: "After several weeks of review, EA has come back with a response regarding funding and/or licensing for Alice: Asylum. On the question of funding, they have ultimately decided to pass on the project based on an internal analysis of the IP, market conditions, and details of the production proposal. On the question of licensing, they replied that "Alice" is an important part of EA's overall game catalog, and selling or licensing it isn't something they're prepared to do right now."McGee concludes that the project is now at an end: "At this point, we have exhausted every option for getting a new "Alice" game made. With those answers from EA, there is no other way forward with the project. As such, we will be hibernating this Patreon page and related pre-production activities. The content will remain in place but we'll no longer present options for funding "Alice: Asylum" efforts via this (or any other) platform." He proceeds to acknowledge key contributors to the project, and thanks them for their artistic and design contributions.

McGee also announces, with great frustration, his total retirement from games development: "For my part, I have also reached an endpoint with "Alice" and with game production in general. I have no other ideas or energy left to apply toward getting a new Alice game made. Nor do I have any interest in pursuing new game ideas within the context of the current environment for game development. This brings us full circle to the statement I made years ago which initiated EA reaching out to me to ask if I wanted to explore making a new Alice game...I have no control over the Alice IP and no ability to make a new game happen. That control and ability rest entirely with EA. If someone does manage to convince EA to make "Asylum," I would like to make clear that, from this point forward, I have no desire to be involved with that or any other Alice-related development. My involvement with "Alice" is also at an end. Going forward, I will focus on my family and our family business at Mysterious."


McGee has found recent financial success with the Mysterious range of plushies, so much so that he has managed to pay off debts with his former boss (at ID Software) John Carmack. It is refreshing to see that the pair are on good terms, given the torrid history between many original developers of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake. McGee was fired by John Carmack in early 1998, due to the submission of (alleged to be) inadequate level designs intended for the - at the time - in-progress Quake III project. McGee has stated, decades later, that he did not receive an official explanation for his sacking from ID Software: "I was never told any solid reason for being fired. To this day, I still don't know. But I am willing to accept that it was a mix of reasons including internal politics and my own failings."