The game designer has asked fans to stop pestering him about the project.

American McGee’s Alice was released by Electronic Arts in 2000 and Alice: Madness Returns in 2011. For the past few years, McGee has been trying to get the publisher to agree to a third installment, Alice: Asylum, but neither that nor the Kickstarter for Alice: Otherlands never materialized. In a February video, the designer asked EA to fund the project when they had no interest in it (and owned the IP rights), and in another April video, he said he had to move on due to lack of publisher interest and announced his retirement as a game designer. And the pre-production, pre-development work that has been done so far has been shared with the public, so the Alice: Asylum “Design Bible” is available here.

“I was emotionally devastated by the rejection of our proposal. Not only because we had invested so much in it as a community and as creators, but because I felt very strongly that it presented a vision for something that was not only achievable, but would have been quite beautiful,” McGee said in the video, adding that he was also somewhat ashamed. According to him, it’s not as simple as taking the Alice in Wonderland property (because it’s in the public domain) and making an unofficial sequel out of it. If it were that easy, he would have started already…

He then thought about AI as a possible sequel: “There is a ray of hope for those of you out there who would like to see Alice’s story continue, and that is that the design bible, the complete story, the artwork, all the chapters, the weapons, the enemies, everything you might need to develop the new game: it all exists in the design bible that we have produced. This thought is going to be controversial for some people, but mark my words, in a few years it will be something that makes a lot of sense to a lot of people out there. And that is that the design bible, as produced, is the perfect thing to feed into an AI system to have it completely build the game that is outlined in that design bible.

I think that if you’re going to spend your time trying to figure out how to resurrect Alice’s future, that time would be better spent trying to solve those kinds of [AI-related] problems, rather than constantly asking me questions that I don’t have answers to, and about properties that I don’t have control over. And if you’re just now starting to think about all the ways you could get sued or otherwise in trouble for pursuing such an idea, then welcome to the club. This is exactly how I feel every time people on the Internet suggest ways to fix the problem with Alice and EA. If your interest is in Alice, I suggest you find a community elsewhere to continue those conversations,” McGee said.

Game over.

Source: PCGamer