Spicy Horse () was a Shanghai-based

independent video game developer An indie game, short for independent video game, is a video game typically created by individuals or smaller development teams without the financial and technical support of a large game publisher, in contrast to most "AAA" (triple-A) games. ...

started by

American McGee American James McGee (born December 13, 1972)Birth record for American James McGee - Dallas, Texas, Birth Index, 1903–1997 - Ancestry.com is an American video game designer. He is best known as the designer of ''American McGee's Alice'', its ...

, 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 virtual camera system, third-person Action-adventure game, action-adventure video game developed by Rogue Entertainment under the direction of designer American McGee and published by Electronic Arts under th ...

''.

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 have 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 Zhabei, formerly romanized as Chapei, is a neighborhood and a former district of Shanghai with a land area of and a resident population of 847,300 as of 2013. It is the location of the Shanghai railway station, one of the main railway stations ...

Shanghai Shanghai (; , , Standard Mandarin pronunciation: ) is one of the four direct-administered municipalities of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The city is located on the southern estuary of the Yangtze River, with the Huangpu River flowin ...

. The company's development process utilizeed a "core team" methodology and 100% outsourced 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 membership platform that provides business tools for content creators to run a subscription service. It helps creators and artists earn a monthly income by providing rewards and perks to their subscribers. Patreon charges a com ...

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 2005. It provided users with classic arcade video games and game-related video content. The service was acquired by French online video game service Met ...

in July 2008 in an episodic form and ran through March 2009. It was built using Epic's

Unreal Engine 3 Unreal Engine (UE) is a 3D computer graphics game engine developed by Epic Games, first showcased in the 1998 first-person shooter game '' Unreal''. Initially developed for PC first-person shooters, it has since been used in a variety of genre ...

. 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 Apple employee Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer game industry and promoted the ...

, titled '' Alice: Madness Returns''. It is the first console game entirely designed and developed in China for export. Spicy Horse spawned a childcompany, Spicy Pony, for creating digital mobile media games for the iPhone. Their first title, ''DexIQ'' was released in early December 2009. Their second was a

Little Red Riding Hood "Little Red Riding Hood" is a European fairy tale about a young girl and a sly wolf. Its origins can be traced back to several pre-17th century European folk tales. The two best known versions were written by Charles Perrault and the Brot ...

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