Alice creator American McGee says he was inspired by a Valve demo he saw while working on Quake 2

American McGee’s Alice wasn’t a big hit, but it has proven to be one of those enduring cult classics: 26 years after its release, there’s still demand for a new one. In a recent post on X, McGee shared some insights into one of the inspirations for that game—which was also his first real signal that his days at id Software were numbered.

McGee got his start at id, first in tech support and then as a level designer for games including Doom, Quake, and Quake 2. “There was this one time at id Software when we were working on Quake 2 and everyone piled into Paul Steed’s office to check out what Valve was doing was our tech,” McGee wrote in response to a post featuring a gameplay clip of American McGee’s Alice.

“And there was a cinematic scene with characters moving around while a crane operating and multiple cameras panning around to convey some element of the narrative. Proper cinematic storytelling using the Quake engine!”

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Reacting to the scene, McGee says he “let out a breathless ‘WOW’,” and reacting to that, “the whole room turned around and scowled at me.”

“That was the moment I knew, ‘OK, well. I want to tell stories with this tech. And these guys don’t,” he wrote.

(Brief aside: In a reply to someone who literally called him a “liar,” because that’s X for you, McGee said he wasn’t talking about Half-Life or any other released game: “What we saw was what they were messing around with in the engine—where they were building the tools in the that they would later go on to use in creating Half Life.”)

(Image credit: American McGee (Twitter))

It would’ve been not too long after that incident that McGee was fired from id: Quake 2 came out in December 1997, and McGee was fired in October ’98. The reasons for his firing are still shrouded in mystery—John Carmack said at the time that “we were not seeing what we wanted” from McGee’s work, although former designer Sandy Peterson suggested some years later that McGee was done dirty by a fellow employee—but McGee said he very quickly realized that the sense he got during that Valve presentation was the right one.

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“That was why, on the day I was fired from id, I first cried… and then driving home with a box of my crap in the trunk of the car, I began smiling. Then laughing,” he wrote. “And the first chance I was given to do something on my own with that tech? Well, I pushed it as hard as I could in relation to surreal visuals and cinematic storytelling.”

Not long after that, he joined EA and made American McGee’s Alice, then disembarked to China, where he founded a new studio called Spicy Horse and developed the sequel, Alice: Madness Returns. After a third Alice game was rejected by EA in 2023, he retired from game development, but announced his return earlier this year to make a spiritual successor to the series based on his Plushy Dreadful stuffed toys.