The Strange Case Of Who Owns American McGee’s Alice

The case of Alice: Asylum is a strange one that throws up many questions about who truly owns an idea, and what it means to have the rights to one. It all starts with American McGee’s Alice back in 2000, a gothic horror platform sandbox game loosely based on Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass, which were written 140 years prior. The game imagined Alice as an asylum patient, hiding from her tortured life as an orphan thanks to a house fire by imagining Wonderland, but this place too is poisoned by her dark thoughts.

It’s based on a character by a long-dead author whose copyright has expired, freshly imagined by game designer American McGee, although he has a hundred-strong team of devs working with him. And it was published and sold by EA. Ethically, it poses a tricky question of ownership. Legally, cut and dried – EA does. That’s where the problems start.

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American McGee’s Alice was followed by the sequel Alice: Madness Returns, released 11 years later. The game was still designed by McGee, still based on Carroll’s stories, and still published by EA. It became even more of a cult hit than the first, but not the sort of ‘fly off the shelves, order seven sequels and make them all always-online’ hit EA routinely backs, so we were still waiting on the third game. Behind the scenes, McGee has been slowly planning it, drafting a 414-page design document available on his Patreon detailing ideas for the game, which would be called Alice: Asylum. There’s just one issue – EA doesn’t want to make it.

Despite not creating the original character or this series’ specific version (that would be Carroll and McGee respectively), EA owns the series, and EA doesn’t want to make anymore. It has not rejected Alice: Asylum because it wants it to be retooled, it just does not want to make any more Alice games. However, it also doesn’t want to sell the license, so nobody can make Alice games. Without seeing the specific copyright, I’m not sure if it means no Alice in Wonderland games or none with McGee’s specific style, but that hardly matters to McGee. He has a game he wants to make, with the character he has written, fully designed and concepted, and he can’t make it because a company would rather the rights sit in a drawer somewhere gathering dust.

There are reasons the world works this way. It’s unlikely McGee could have made certainly the first game, and likely not the second game either, without EA’s investment in the publishing. As part of the deal struck, EA would own the rights. It’s something companies often do to ensure long-term revenue streams, and something creators often sign away because they need the money to make the first, and back themselves to be successful enough to earn a second trip around the moon. McGee did that, twice. People still love Madness Returns and want to go back to that world. It would be one thing if EA was selling the rights elsewhere for more money, or had hired a different creative to oversee it after differences with McGee. But its plan is just to own Alice and do nothing with it.

Legally, the case is open and shut. But we should not just accept the legality and move on in situations like this. Disney has repeatedly lobbied to adjust copyright laws to protect their ownership of Mickey Mouse, proving the laws only protect one side of this debate. Alice Madness Returns is popular, though perhaps not enough for this to kick up as big of a fuss as it should. But it’s the second incident like this in as many weeks in gaming, and maybe we should be a little more vigilant.

Dark and Darker’s devs were sued by their former employers Nexxon over accusations of asset theft, but reading up on the case it became clear it was a lot messier. The studio created several prototypes, including one like Dark and Darker. When that one was rejected, the team working on it quit to make their own game, Dark and Darker. Nexxon is content to let an idea like Dark and Darker rot in a cupboard somewhere, and is crying foul when the people who made it initially and had it rejected now want to make it again.

American McGee is already using an existing character for Alice, and it’s 12 years since the last game, which was a cult classic rather than a blockbuster. Not a lot of people are going to pay attention to this, and EA is legally 100 percent in the right. There’s a lot of cards stacked against this one. We should still care. It’s bad for everyone if companies can buy other peoples’ ideas and let them rot despite the creator’s intentions, and I hope Alice: Asylum can one day come to life.

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