Spicy Horse () was a Shanghai-based independent video game developer started by American McGee, Anthony Jacobson, and Adam Lang in 2007. It was announced on July 23, 2016, that the company is closing its doors to focus on smaller indie development. The studio is best known for '' Alice: Madness Returns'', the sequel to ''

American McGee's Alice ''American McGee's Alice'' is a 2000 third-person dark fantasy action-adventure video game developed by Rogue Entertainment under the direction of designer American McGee and published by Electronic Arts under the EA Games banner. The game ...

''.

History

After shutting his then-company The Mauretania Import Export Company, American McGee flew to Asia to seek business opportunities. From there, he met a pool of talented people in China who had been working and outsourcing games for western developers for many years but did not have any creative control over the IPs. American saw this as a favourable circumstance and decided to form a company in Shanghai to not only provide job opportunities to local talents but to also offer a healthy work environment. The studio was established in 2007. It was called a studio "leading the way" in episodic games. It was the largest independent Western developer in China. Spicy Horse employed more than 70 people at their studio in Zhabei District,

Shanghai Shanghai, Shanghainese: , Standard Chinese pronunciation: is a direct-administered municipality and the most populous urban area in China. The city is located on the Chinese shoreline on the southern estuary of the Yangtze River, with the ...

. The company's development process utilized a "core team" methodology and 100%

outsource Outsourcing is a business practice in which company, companies use external providers to carry out business processes that would otherwise be handled internally. Outsourcing sometimes involves transferring employees and assets from one firm to ...

d art asset production to conserve energy directed at the core competencies of game development. Following rumors regarding the studio's closure, on March 29, 2016, McGee acknowledged that there had been some layoffs but they will continue to operate and will look to move away from F2P mobile games in the future. In 2016, McGee announced the closure of Spicy Horse after 10 years of development. He plans to focus on indie development using

Patreon Patreon (, ) is a monetization platform operated by Patreon, Inc., that provides business tools for content creators to run a subscription service and sell digital products. It helps artists and other creators earn a recurring income by provid ...

and work on a different work environment like his sailboat.

Products

Their first title, ''

American McGee's Grimm ''American McGee's Grimm'' is a 23-part episodic video game series based upon ''Grimm's Fairy Tales'', designed by American McGee, developed by Spicy Horse and distributed online initially by GameTap starting July 31, 2008. ''Grimm'' was origin ...

'', was released on

GameTap GameTap was an online video game service established by Turner Broadcasting System (TBS) in 2006. It provided users with video games and game-related video content. The service was acquired by French online video game service Metaboli in 2008 as ...

in July 2008 in an episodic form and ran through March 2009. It was built using Epic's Unreal Engine 3. Spicy Horse developed the sequel to ''

'' for

Electronic Arts Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) is an American video game company headquartered in Redwood City, California. Founded in May 1982 by former Apple Inc., Apple employee Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer game industry ...

, titled '' Alice: Madness Returns''. It is the first console game entirely designed and developed in

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

for export. Spicy Horse spawned a childcompany, Spicy Pony, for creating digital mobile media games for the

iPhone The iPhone is a line of smartphones developed and marketed by Apple that run iOS, the company's own mobile operating system. The first-generation iPhone was announced by then–Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007, at ...

. Their first title, ''DexIQ'' was released in early December 2009. Their second was a

Little Red Riding Hood "Little Red Riding Hood" () is a fairy tale by Charles Perrault about a young girl and a Big Bad Wolf. Its origins can be traced back to several pre-17th-century European Fable, folk tales. It was later retold in the 19th-century by the Broth ...

adaption for the iPad called ''Akaneiro''. Their next project was to be an adaptation of '' The Wizard of Oz'', '' OZombie'', financed by a

Kickstarter Kickstarter, PBC is an American Benefit corporation, public benefit corporation based in Brooklyn, New York City, that maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity. The company's stated mission is to "help bring creative project ...

campaign. The campaign was cancelled on July 14, 2013, in order to focus on a series of ''Alice'' short films and due to lack of support for the OZombie project.

References

External links

Spicy Horse Games official site
* *{{webarchive , url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110709020048/http://www.dexiq.com/ , date=July 9, 2011 , title=DexIQ Companies based in Shanghai Chinese companies established in 2007 Chinese companies disestablished in 2016 Privately held companies of China Video game development companies Video game companies established in 2007 Video game companies disestablished in 2016 Defunct video game companies of China