American McGee hits his Kickstarter target for Alice: Otherlands

Game developer American McGee has met his goal of raising funds for the 3D-animated short films based on Alice: Otherlands. In a Kickstarter campaign that closed on Saturday, McGee raised $222,377 from 3,389 backers, surpassing the minimum target of $200,000.

The campaign came down to the wire as it was still short with just a couple of days to go in the 20-day campaign. Now McGee will be able to create a series of short films based on his twisted vision of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. McGee created a third-person action video game, American McGee’s Alice, a nightmare version of the fairy tale published by Electronic Arts in 2000. It was a wildly creative title and it cemented McGee’s reputation as a creative force in the industry.

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The game sold well enough, with more than 1.5 million copies in circulation, but not so spectacularly that a sequel was easy to pull off. McGee finally succeeded in publishing that sequel, Alice: Madness Returns, in 2011.

“I’m more excited than a shark in a tornado,” said American McGee, CEO of Spicy Horse Games, in a statement. “We’re already in meetings and I’m on the road next week to wrangle up more interest. Working with Alice and the Insane Children that love her is one of my favorite things in the world.”

Meanwhile, director Wes Craven signed on to do a film adaptation of the game in 2000 with screenwriter John August. The movie was never made, and instead, Tim Burton created his own film remake of Alice in Wonderland with a somewhat twisted storyline.

McGee moved to China and started his own game studio, Spicy Horse Games. He has been creating a variety of titles for digital game platforms, and recently tried to do a Kickstarter campaign for a title he called OZombie. But fans didn’t fund the title and, in the meantime, word of the Alice film effort also surfaced. McGee ended the OZombie campaign early and then started the Alice: Otherlands film campaign.

McGee sees Alice: Otherlands as the third part of the Alice trilogy. Set in 1875, Alice now has a superhero-like power to invade the minds of others, hence “Otherlands.” McGee hopes that the short films will eventually lead to a chance to make Alice for the big screen.