Promotional image for video game Alice: Madness Returns. Picture: Electronics Arts / Spicy Horse Source: Supplied
Promotional image for video game Alice: Madness Returns. Picture: Electronic Arts / Spicy Horse Source: Supplied
YOU wouldn't think just by looking at him that American McGee was the mind behind of one of the darkest cult video games in history.
Tall, unassuming, with strawberry blonde hair and dressed in a white shirt and black blazer, he looks oddly out of place among the toadstools and red wooden thrones scattered about the room.
In 2000, McGee introduced players to his own twisted take on the world of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.
One of the most creative ? and macabre ? games of its time, American McGee's Alice imagined what Wonderland might look like if Carroll's heroine lost her mind.
Now, eleven years later, McGee is preparing to release a sequel. At a media preview event in Sydney he spoke to news.com.au about Alice: Madness Returns.
"I can remember the copy of the book that I had," he said of the classic he read many times as a child, and many more as an adult.
"The size and the feel of it. I know it made an impression on me as a child.
"I think Humpty Dumpty (from Through the Looking Glass) had a pretty significant impact on me. It was a pretty dark piece of the story ? this character shattering and breaking."
The image of Alice from McGee's first game ? with black-rimmed eyes and a bloody knife ? has become almost as recognisable in pop culture as her more wholesome depiction in the Disney film of 1951.
At Halloween parties and gaming conferences around the world, eyeliner and a blue dress spattered with red have become an outfit of choice.
McGee said that more than the storyline or the setting, it was this version of Alice he wanted to do justice to in Madness Returns.
"The constant mantra I kept repeating from the very beginning all the way to the end was: 'It's not about the design I'm looking for, it's not about the story that I'm trying to tell'," he said.
"It's in fact about Alice as a character and someone that is now coming into a new story, a new narrative, a new gameplay experience, and honouring her as a character."
Both of McGee's games take place after the events of Carroll's books and imagine Alice as an asylum patient after losing her family to a house fire.
"This is the moment where the books end and we depart into the world of the Alice we've created," he said.
"She ends up in a mental asylum and has to find her way out, as we find her in the beginning of this game.
"She's trying to piece back together what happened that night and still struggling against the madness that's been brought on by that horrible event.
"At the same time she's using this tool she's had since she was a child, which is practically her superpower ? to go into her own mental landscape and overcome all these obstacles and solve these problems."
Creating Alice
For Madness Returns, McGee said he couldn?t have found a better artistic director than Ken Wong ? perhaps the only person to have read and watched Alice in Wonderland more often than himself.
"I grew up watching the Disney version," Wong told news.com.au.
"I had this weird habit of watching VHS tapes over and over again. I would watch a movie all the way through and rewind it and watch it again.
"The really strong memory for me was watching the Disney version and seeing what happens to the oysters.
"They tried to 'Disneyfy' it a bit, but you got the feeling there was something terrible and tragic there.
"It's something that a lot of the time Disney backs away from, but that kind of darkness, that's the kind of showman's entertainment that sticks with you, and that I love."
"A lot of stuff happens in the books that's really f---ed up and surreal."
Unlike Disney, Wong and McGee made an effort to tease out the darkest themes of Carroll's books to create a multi-layered murder mystery.
"A lot of stuff happens in the books that's really f---ed up and surreal," he said.
"The same goes for stuff like Where the Wild Things Are, or the Dark Crystal which is supposed to be for kids, and The NeverEnding Story.
"You talk to most people of that generation and they actually remember being terrified watching these movies."
Wong said almost every aspect of Madness Returns was informed in some way by the original text and most elements had a deeper meaning ? even Alice's clothes, adorned with alchemy symbols, are clues.
"With the imagery, the alchemy symbols on her dress, the original inspiration for this is (that) there is an actual connection between psychology and alchemy," he said.
"I did quite a lot of reading on this topic. I read about the psychology of the character.
"You look at the way we apply the alchemy symbols throughout the game ? there?s actually a little bit of a storytelling going on there in terms of the representations of some of the characters to different elements of our psyche.
"Some of them are related to our ego, our super ego. It's just moving through this experience and actually kind of mirroring that experience in the symbolic sense of the game."
Alice: Madness Returns will be released on June 16 for for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.
Chat about this story w/ Talkita
0 comments:
Post a Comment