The game all takes place in Washington, but your team is based in Finland. So many of those things happened early on, a couple of years back, and I have nothing in my mind that I would feel sad about today, because I am very happy with the way that the game has finally ended up being. That kind of material that you had to leave behind or cut off usually happens early on in the project, when you are still looking at what the focus really should be about, and the closer and closer that you come to the end, the more you know what it should be, and you have tested different things, and you know what works and what doesn’t work. I think that as we go on with the project, the focus and the research gets stronger, and all of the team members are working in sync with each other. With those, we knew that we wanted to do a story and a character-centric game, and with the sandbox prototype we were constantly running into situations where we had to do compromises, either with the gameplay or with the story, and in the end we decided that it wasn’t worth it - the sandbox element would not fit into the vision that we had for what Alan Wake should be.Ĭan you give me an example of a compromise you had to make because of the gameplay? We did take that quite far and naturally there was an effect on the story. It was quite early on in the project when we were prototyping different gameplay elements, and the sandbox concept and sandbox ideas were among those. How much rewriting was required when the change happened? The game was originally conceived as an open-world, Grand Theft Auto–style game, but the final product is more linear. It’s really the whole project over five years. A week before the final version, we have a final voice-over recording and we always write new dialogue lines. We go back and forth it’s a continuous dialogue. There will be early drafts of the synopsis, and then while we are prototyping different gaming elements, we go back to the story all the time. We start to work on the technology and the tools we use to build the game at the same time, but really the story is very much the first thing. We spoke with Remedy’s lead writer, Sam Lake.Īlan Wake was in the works for five years. Over six missions, each broken up like a TV episode (“Last time on Alan Wake … ,” each begins), the game tips its hat to King, David Lynch, The Twilight Zone, and Lost. But when his wife goes missing under creepy circumstances, Wake, armed primarily with a flashlight, sets out to find her in a town under the influence of a dark supernatural presence. In the game, you play the titular character, a Stephen King–resembling horror author who takes a trip to fictional Bright Falls, Washington, in an attempt to ease his writers’ block. If you thought Twilight made the Pacific Northwest look scary, wait until you play Alan Wake, Remedy Entertainment’s new five-years-in-the-making psychological thriller, out this week for Xbox 360.
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