Here's what you do when you're a single person covering a gaming event and you're focused on one game. During the canned speeches where gaming celebrities read marketing copy off a teleprompter, you begin to inch towards the back of the room where the single hands-on station for that game happens to be, left unattended while people pretend to be interested in the live action press release taking place in front of them. You sit down, and when the PR person turns on the system, you grab the controller and thank them profusely.

Within seconds of my picking up the controller and diving into Alice: Madness Returns, the floor of the Game Developer's Conference was filled with people wanting to get their first look at the sequel to one of gaming's biggest cult hits. American McGee told the crowd the original sold over one million copies, yet it took this long for EA to greenlight the sequel. The crowd "ooohed" and "aaahed" as I played the game, and we all drank in the artwork and design. I had an interview to do very soon, and I was sure I wouldn't get a chance to see much of the game before the controller was taken from me, but for that moment, it was just me and Alice.

Here's the short version of this story: the game plays just as good as it looks.

Why did it take so long?

American McGee's Alice was released in the year 2000, and was built using the id Tech 3 engine. It was a PC release, and it took the title character from Lewis Caroll's Alice in Wonderland in a dark, gothic direction. The game also featured some mind-bending platforming sequences and beautiful artwork. Even the menus were fascinating—the options to "Load," "Save," or "Delete" were featured prominently, with the first letter of each word written in large, fancy script so that the message was clear. Many fans played the game in something other than their right mind.

McGee left EA to start his own studio, and released Scrapland and Bad Day L.A., while plans for American McGee's Oz were scuttled due to Atari's financial difficulties. American McGee's Grimm was released as an episodic series via GameTap, but none of these games reached the artistic or commercial highs of Alice. When the sequel was finally announced at last year's D.I.C.E. summit the gaming world sighed in relief. This was a world that needed a second visit.

So why did it take so long for a sequel to happen? "You'd have to ask EA," McGee told Ars. "It's really a matter of being in the right place and the right time, just like the first game... it just had to play out a certain way in a certain time." It's a political answer, but we're sure the real story is more interesting. What's important is that by waiting this long, both EA and American McGee's studio Spicy Horse were able to grab the gaming world's imagination with just the idea of the game before any art or trailers were shown. This isn't a sequel to a successful PC title—it's the homecoming of a now-loved game that went out at the height of its popularity. Sure, it's coming to consoles, but the world has changed in the past eleven years.

On the other hand, hasn't Tim Burton plowed this field? "We don't really know where he was borrowing from, but we've read enough online from people who like our game and suggest that there was a lot borrowed in there," McGee said. "But for us there was something that started 11 years ago... we created a character that we believed in and the audience responded to, and the world in which she lived. We were very focused on art, very focused on storytelling, we weren't that interested in cheap thrills and blood and gore. It was about telling a real story around a real character." There you go.

Executive Producer R.J. Berg agreed, saying that the Burton film wasn't much of an influence. "When EA came back to us, they weren't really aware of Burton's progress in Disney's revivification of Alice," he told Ars. "They were looking for the next chapter of the thing they had put us to work on back in 2000."

This is an odd place to be when you're working on a sequel. The original game is considered a classic now, but with Madness Returns coming to consoles as well as PC, and with so much time having passed, you have to introduce new players to the world while taking care of the fans. "We've put a lot of work into layering the old story and the old concept into this game. It's a natural narrative progression from the first game to the second, but we didn't want to leave people behind who hadn't played the first game," McGee said.

Much of the content written for the first game has been included in this release, and you'll be able to see evidence of your actions if you played through the original. "We layered markers from Alice's past throughout the gameplay... the Queen's domain is the domain after Alice's visit in the first game. You can see the destruction—once you get to the Queen you hear that [Alice has] been here before, and she's done this before. That actually becomes critical to the story, that Alice is repeating these interactions and this journey inside of Wonderland." You'll also get audio and text snippets from Alice's past that explain her motivation and her actions prior to this story.