Trivia / Alice: Madness Returns

• Executive Meddling: Reportedly EA was giving American McGee pressure to ramp up the levels of sex, gore, and general Darker and Edgier Content (to the point McGee explicitly described what EA was going towards as "Dante's Inferno + Alice") in the hopes that the game would get an "M" rating close to the dreaded "AO" rating. He gave them Shock Content, all right—the "M-Snail", a deliberately Not Safe for Work monstrosity ^note consisting of a snail with, well, a penis as its foot/body and breasts for eyes with a friendly reassurance that he'd make sure it made it in the game. Needless to say, EA backed down and quickly, otherwise....
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: There are two PC versions of this game; one is The Complete Collection which features a remastered version of the first Alice game and all of the sequel's DLCs, and the standard edition. You can get the standard in the Origin store but The Complete Collection can only be obtained if you get a CD key for it elsewhere. The standard version was also formerly available on Steam, but have since been pulled and now Origin exclusive (although the EA-related DRM was removed in the Steam version in a 2022 patch and only uses Valve's DRM instead). Origin keys for The Complete Collection and standard editions on PC did later became available through Humble Bundle around 2019-2020. For console players, the Xbox 360 version of Alice: Madness Returns is still available digitally through Xbox Live, which has also became backwards compatible for Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S, and the remastered version of the first Alice can be downloaded as free DLC for the sequel.
• Orphaned Reference: One pause menu quote during The Dollhouse level goes as follows: "Mad enough. Do you see yourself? The seeds of your destruction were sown long ago, and now he will reap the harvest. He owns your mind; you've just been renting. You owe a debt and he will collect. You're already gone." This quote is never heard anywhere in the game and in fact, the character it is attributed to (the Doll Girl enemy) never speaks at all. Game data contains a longer version of the quote in question, as well as other lines that were apparently going to be spoken by the Doll Girl before being cut.
• Sequel Gap: Alice: Madness Returns was released in 2011, over 10 years after the first Alice (American McGee's Alice: December 6, 2000; Alice: Madness Returns June 14, 2011).
• What Could Have Been: According to Word of God, you really would have fought the March Hare and Dormouse at one point, but development pressures forced them to cut it.
  • Also likely to have resulted in What Happened to the Mouse? for a few characters in the game.
  • The artbook also shows lots of concept art and details that not only describe what you see in the game, but a lot of it is stuff that should have been in it but didn't make it.
  • Go to YouTube. Search "Alice Madness Returns Beta Trailer". It's full of old stuff and development things that were planned but never made it into the game, like a swimming level, new cutscenes, new weapons, actual gameplay in the London stages and a rather bloody Victorian scene...
  • At least two levels were scrapped during development, one in a world based on M.C. Escher's work, and the other on the moon.
  • One page of the artbook depicts scrapped ideas for being able to smash through barriers while 'dashing' in a run or swim. Directly underneath is a scrapped dress design featuring streams of horse hair and a spiralling horn on her forehead, so clearly someone at the studio was thinking of Robot Unicorn Alice!

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