Spicy Horse

» see spicyhorse.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

American McGee had already been a name on a box, which almost no designer manages. He came out of id, where he worked on Doom II and Quake, and in 2000 EA published American McGee's Alice with his name in the title. In 2007 he started Spicy Horse in Shanghai's Zhabei District with Anthony Jacobson and Adam Lang, on a premise that sounded strange then and sounds obvious now: run a Western development studio in China, sell the output in the West.

The first output was American McGee's Grimm in 2008, an episodic series of fairy tales for GameTap, which is one dead platform carrying another. Then EA came back for a sequel to Alice, and Alice: Madness Returns shipped in 2011 with more than eighty five people on it. Spicy Horse described it as the first console game entirely designed and developed in China for export, and the way it got made is as interesting as the game: a core team in Shanghai with essentially all art production outsourced.

After that there was no next publisher contract. Akaneiro: Demon Hunters in 2013 was a free-to-play action game with a Little Red Riding Hood premise, and the OZombie Kickstarter, a Wizard of Oz project, was cancelled on 14 July 2013 before it funded. The studio went from eighty five people to six. On 23 July 2016 McGee posted that the Shanghai studio was closing, framed it as a radical shift rather than a defeat, and said he was moving to indie development and to his sailboat in Southeast Asia.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ made in Shanghai, sold in the west ~

The whole bet was on cost structure. A Shanghai studio in 2008 could put more artists on a game per dollar than an American one, and if the direction came from a Western designer the output would read as Western. It worked once, on a game that had EA paying for it, and it did not survive EA going away.

The problem with being a cost-efficient studio is that your customer is not the player, it is the person who commissioned you. When the commissions stopped, Spicy Horse had a well-run building in a country it could not raise Western money from and a brand that was legally somebody else's. Alice belongs to EA, which meant the studio's best-known work needed permission for a sequel, and nine years of goodwill with players sat on top of no product Spicy Horse owned outright.

~ the crowdfunding door was closed ~

OZombie failed to fund in 2013, and that year was the peak of the idea that crowdfunding had replaced publishers for exactly this kind of studio. It had not, and the geography is part of why. Kickstarter's creator eligibility was United States and United Kingdom only until 2013 and then expanded to a short list of English-speaking and EU countries. Shanghai was never on it, and neither is Turkey, which is the reason the whole 2012 to 2015 crowdfunding boom arrived where I live as something you could read about and put money into but never launch from. The platform that was supposed to route around gatekeepers had a gate of its own, and it was a list of countries.

~ the sailboat ~

McGee kept the Spicy Horse name as a label and used it for small releases, and later ran Pirate Jam, a game jam held on a flotilla of boats, which is either a joke about the industry or an escape from it. Years after the closure he went back to trying to get a third Alice game made, pitching EA publicly and being turned down publicly, and that story is still going nowhere in 2026.

The grave here belongs to the building rather than to the designer, who is still working. Eighty five people in Shanghai's Zhabei District built a console game for the export market in 2011, before anyone treated that as a route, and what remains of it is one 2011 EA release that sold to people on another continent who mostly never learned where it was made.

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