Spicy Horse

Spicy Horse was an independent video game developer founded in Shanghai in 2007 by American McGee, Anthony Jacobson, and Adam Lang. At its peak the studio employed over 85 people and was the largest independent Western game developer operating in China. Best known for Alice: Madness Returns in 2011, the sequel to American McGee’s Alice, the studio closed its Shanghai doors in July 2016 after ten years of operation and approximately ten games.

American McGee and the Founding of Spicy Horse

American McGee began his career at id Software as a level designer, contributing to Doom II, Quake, and Quake II before creating American McGee’s Alice for Electronic Arts in 2000, a dark reimagining of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland built around childhood trauma and psychological horror. After leaving EA, McGee relocated to Asia in 2004 and spent several years in Shanghai before identifying an opportunity to work with Chinese developers who had extensive AAA outsourcing experience but no creative control over the projects they contributed to. Spicy Horse was founded in 2007 to change that dynamic, offering both job stability and genuine creative involvement to local talent.

American McGee’s Grimm and Early Projects

Spicy Horse’s first project was American McGee’s Grimm, an episodic action game released through the GameTap subscription service beginning in July 2008. The game retold Brothers Grimm fairy tales through a deliberately dark lens, with players controlling a grotesque dwarf who transforms bright storybook worlds into grim, corrupted versions of themselves. The episodic format made Grimm one of the early experiments in serialized digital game distribution, and the project received favorable reviews that established Spicy Horse’s ability to execute on McGee’s specific dark fairytale aesthetic.

Alice Madness Returns

Alice: Madness Returns is Spicy Horse’s defining release, published by Electronic Arts in June 2011 for Windows, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. The game continues Alice Liddell’s story a decade after the events of the original, following her through a Wonderland that is collapsing and being consumed by a corruption tied to a repressed memory of real-world trauma. Built in Unreal Engine 3, the game expanded on the original’s gothic action platforming with new movement mechanics, a wider range of weapons, and a visual identity that drew heavily on Victorian horror illustration and the specific grotesque quality McGee had established in the 2000 original. The game released alongside a remastered version of American McGee’s Alice and sold well enough to renew interest in a third entry that never arrived.

Later Projects and the Alice Rights Problem

After Alice: Madness Returns, Spicy Horse developed mobile and social games including BigHead BASH, Crazy Fairies, and Akaneiro: Demon Hunters, the last of which was successfully Kickstarter-funded in 2013. Alice: Otherlands, a Kickstarter-funded animated short film series continuing the Alice story, was also completed and released in 2014. A third Alice game, referred to as Alice: Asylum, remained in conceptual development but could not progress because Electronic Arts owns the Alice intellectual property and declined to pursue a sequel. The rights situation that blocked Alice: Asylum remains unresolved.

Closure

American McGee announced the closure of Spicy Horse’s Shanghai studio on July 22, 2016, citing the challenges of the free-to-play mobile market and the significant reduction in staff that had already occurred. The studio had peaked at over 85 employees during the development of Alice: Madness Returns and was down to six by the time of the closure. The Spicy Horse company continued to exist in a minimal capacity to maintain existing online games. McGee subsequently focused on smaller projects in Shanghai alongside wife Yeni Zhang, including Plushie Dreadfuls, a soft toy and fashion brand, and the annual Pirate Jam event.