Articles: Putting Alan Wake to Bed

Tim Grey speaks with the man behind one of this year’s most acclaimed games

Five long years have passed since Matias Myllyrinne began working on an idea for a game about a writer.

“In 2005 we came out with the concept, and in December 2005 we signed with Microsoft, so it’s been a fair journey,” said Matias. “It’s been longer than what I thought back in the day.”

His team at Finnish gaming studio Remedy had already chalked up the popular Max Payne series to its list of achievements, pioneering a cinematic gaming experience that was at that stage still rare. For Alan Wake, Matias wanted to push the envelope further still, amalgamating the small-town surrealism of Twin Peaks with a Stephen King-style thriller in a gaming format.

“Everybody was doing bigger and bigger cities. We thought, you know, we’ll take a setting that’s familiar from other sources in popular culture but hasn’t really been done to death in games,” he explains. “We took the picture-perfect town that once you scratch beneath the surface all these deep and dark secrets start to come up.”

The picture-perfect town in question is Bright Falls, by day a leafy community peopled with amiable waitresses and loggers, where crime writer Alan Wake takes repose from crippling writer’s block. Wake soon discovers that by night the town is haunted by a terrifying dark presence known as The Taken. As the force transforms the world around him, Wake begins to question his own sanity.
Remedy went to great pains to achieve a realistic look, using techniques more commonly found on a film set, and adhering to the philosophy
that a thriller must be believable in order to be scary.

“You can use location scouts to make sure you’ve got the right locations, you can use stylists to make sure your characters look authentic, you can use facial [motion capture], stunts, you can use experts in different fields to come and help you and I think that really adds to the overall immersion,” he says. “Especially for a thriller; it needs to be grounded in reality, then you can build a level of supernatural on top of that.”

For Alan Wake’s faceless, elemental antagonists, Remedy had the idea of ink disappearing into water.
“We wanted to have the enemies grounded in reality but something distorted and slightly off,” says Matias. “We dipped black and blue ink into this big barrel and looked at that effect.”

Matias explains this attention to detail was one of the reasons Alan Wake took eight times as long to make as Max Payne. Another was the decision to abandon plans to make the game a Grand Theft Auto-style sandbox.

“We really wanted to tell one story really, really well, as opposed to trying to dilute our efforts. … It started with Max Payne – we just didn’t want to do multiplay because everybody else was doing it,” says Matias. “There’s a natural compulsion for designers in anything, whether it’s gaming or not, when the essence isn’t working that’s when you add stuff around it, rather than just going back to the heart and making sure the core is good.”

Now that Alan Wake is in the hands of gamers, Matias feels as though it’s been worth the wait.

“For us, we wanted to have something good out there as opposed to just getting something out. We could have got it out earlier, but to be honest, what’s the point?” he asks. “It’s hard to get motivated about doing something that’s just okay.”