Sam Lake is the writer behind most of Remedy Entertainment's story driven adventures. Not only did he pen the words that brought Max Payne to life, he's also the face of the character. Lake then helped create the stories for Alan Wake, Quantum Break, and Control. He's one of video games' great storytellers, giving us a wide variety of experiences to explore.
Of all of the stories he's written, Alan Wake is probably the one that is talked about most. Stephen King and Twin Peaks are often brought up when describing Alan Wake's weird dream-like narrative. It's open for interpretation and debate, and its mystery has turned it into one of gaming's most beloved cult classics. Today, Alan Wake turns 10 years old, and fans want more of it.
I recently talked to Lake about the creation of Alan Wake and what he thinks of it now, 10 years later. He also gives a small tease of what we can expect next from Control.
Take me back to day one of you dreaming up Alan Wake. What was the first thing that entered your mind?
Sam Lake: It would be fun to say that I just planned the whole thing like that, but all of these stories and characters and worlds have many beginnings. They come from many different sources and find their way to form something. Coming out of Max Payne 2 and starting to think about the next Remedy project, it ended up being a long time of exploration. We spent over a year concepting different ideas before we landed on Alan Wake. There were multiple different game ideas we explored. I would say that out of those, bit by bit, pieces remained on the table. It was kind of a pendulum swing in some ways. After we had spent seven-plus years on Max Payne, it felt like it was time for something different.
What were some of those other ideas that were left behind?
The first concept we were exploring was actually a fantasy game with a lot of humor in it – quite a bit different than hard-boiled noir. That [game's] engine work and tools started on ideas of light and dark, day and night. As you may know, early on in Alan Wake, we were aiming to create a free-roaming, open-world game, and that was already on the table with the first concept.
Sam Lake
I have to know about the humor in the fantasy game.
It was very Terry Pratchett inspired, tonally. We decided we were not going in that direction after exploring it for a while. There were other concepts, too. There was a zombie-apocalypse game that was kind of a road trip from East Coast to West Coast. And there was another idea with a small town. Although that concept ended up being different than Alan Wake, the small-town idea was something that remained on the table. So we had day and night, light and dark, a small-town setting, and pieces like that – even if the concept we were working on didn’t feel quite right, some elements of it remained. And then we kind of formed Alan Wake, the Twin Peaks inspiration, the Pacific Northwest small town, and also Alan Wake as a writer.
Because of this 10-year anniversary, I’ve been looking at the old documentation and digging that up. These elements were on the table in 2005. Max Payne 2 shipped in late 2003, and then there was a year of exploring, but in early 2005 we had a concept called Alan Wake. We had the writer, Bright Falls as an idyllic, quirky small town, and light and dark as an idea for combat that we viewed as layered. Light was an enabling thing; it weakens the enemy, and then you can use conventional weapons against it. That was there already at that point, but also what we had back then was a free-roaming open world and dynamic day and night cycles.
Early concept art.
At that point, Alan Wake was the focus. How did it all come together?
Looking back with some distance you can see that there is no thinking of how all of these different elements would click together. They were just a level of ambition by a lot of ambitious people. We had a bit of a candy-store feeling after Max Payne, that now everybody gets their wish and let’s just divide it up. That was the road to Alan Wake.
There were certain elements, like I had gone through theater academia in Finland to study screenwriting between Max Payne 1 and 2, and I had written, among other things, one film screenplay in Finnish. It was a horror film. I was drawing from my childhood summer experiences for the setting, but also there were elements like this witch character inspired by the Slavic folklore Baba Yaga. Of course in Alan Wake we have Barbara Jagger, and there were these Swedes, the crazy Anderson brothers, who think they are Viking gods, and there was also the idea of this old light switch that kind of is a tool against the horrors called “The Clicker,” which is an actual childhood toy of mine. I was fascinated by all kinds of junk, and I didn’t necessarily understand what the purpose of something was, but I took them and played around with them. That’s where The Clicker idea came from. I ended up stealing from my own screenplay.
It sounds like you really Frankensteined this thing from a lot of ideas.
That, to me, feels like a natural creative process. I feel that’s how these things are born, at least for me. [laughs]
You said you had the name Alan Wake early on. Is that an idea you knew you wanted out of the gate or did you have other working titles for the game and for the character?
I think there was exploration, but with Alan Wake, we landed quite fast with that name. Obviously, there is the “a” in “awake,” and in some ways in that concept, there was a bit more thematical things dealing with dreams that faded more into the background, and the writing and creative process of it was a bigger element. That’s where Alan Wake’s name comes from. Max Payne is kind of the model there that defined the name of the main character that can serve as the name of the game as well.
I was at the E3 where Alan Wake debuted. It was in a small room that was packed with people. You stood behind us and narrated the demo. That's when Alan Wake was still open-world, right? I remember being impressed by the technology that allowed logs to roll down a hill.
Yes, and back then we didn't even have a publisher. Remedy was in a secure situation after the IP deal of Max Payne, and we just wanted to create the concept and push it further. We created the demo, and with E3 in 2005, we wanted to publicly show what we had. We were feeling good about it, and also felt we could get some interest and hype going. That would put us in a better negotiation situation with the publishers.
An image of Remedy location scouting for Alan Wake
When did you land the publishing deal with Microsoft?
Relatively quick. Within that year. It's been a while, so I don't know the exact timeline of events. We were already in discussions with publishers starting at GDC in 2005. That was ongoing, and we ultimately felt that Microsoft was the best partner for us and for that game. That was moving forward.
When did you start honing it into the direction of not being an open world?
It was a rather long and winding pre-production period for Alan Wake. We were prototyping and exploring relatively wildly and widely on different things, and honestly also being lost with it along the way. The decision, which was ultimately a very painful one to make, was that we sat down and realized we needed to focus the project.
That was in 2008. From 2005 and that first demo to 2008, was the period of obviously building important content, like the world and locations and all kinds of things. The part that was tied to free-roaming the open world and dynamic day and night light cycles was something that we were trying different things with, but we struggled to find a combination of things that would work. This also went to the core gameplay like the enemies and how exactly you're fighting them. We were trying all kinds of things. For the open world, the original concept had these ideas from the story side that there is this small town, and it would have lots of life and personalities and some humor in it. Going into the process of completely figuring out the direction of the game, it started leaning toward strategical survival.