Alan Wake

• 1. Introduction

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  Alan Wake is a 2010 action-adventure game from the Finnish studio Remedy Entertainment, published by Microsoft Game Studios. Its hero is a bestselling crime novelist whose wife vanishes during a vacation in Bright Falls, a small fictional town in Washington State. Stranger still, scenes from his newest thriller begin to happen around him, and he has no memory of writing a word of it. Remedy described the result as "the mind of a psychological thriller" and "the body of a cinematic action game". Why does a shooter ask its player to hunt for scattered pages of a novel? How did a team lose roughly three years building the wrong game? And how did a title that sold slowly grow into a shared universe of games, books and television plans? The answers begin in the dark.

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• 2. The Dark Presence

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  Beneath Cauldron Lake, a volcanic crater lake near Bright Falls, an entity known as the Dark Presence is trapped. It wants out, and its method is strange. It uses the lake's power to turn literature into reality.

  It tried this once before, on a poet named Thomas Zane. The Dark Presence took the form of Zane's spouse, Barbara Jagger, who had drowned in the lake. Zane resisted. He used his own writings to cause the volcanic eruption that sank an island in the lake, and the blast stranded him there. Zane is also the ethereal figure in a diving suit who haunts Alan's nightmare and leaves pages of a manuscript called Departure along his path. Jagger, for her part, is the mysterious old woman Alan keeps meeting.

  Alan pieces this together slowly, and almost everyone around him sees a sick man instead. Sheriff Sarah Breaker tells him that no island or cabin has stood in the lake for decades. She suspects he is mentally unwell. Dr. Emil Hartman, who runs a psychiatric hospital named Cauldron Lake Lodge, insists the whole ordeal is a psychotic break brought on by his wife drowning. Alan later learns that the kidnapper who phoned him, a man named Mott, was hired by Hartman to lure him in.

  The truth lands on a drunken night. Alan and his agent, Barry Wheeler, share moonshine, and Alan remembers being forced to write Departure over the previous week. The Dark Presence is using his writing to escape, and it holds his wife Alice in the lake to make him cooperate.

  A hermit named Cynthia Weaver, who knew Zane, leads the pair to the Well-Lit Room. It holds a light switch called the Clicker, which can destroy the Dark Presence through the power of Alan's writing. Alan dives into the lake alone and lands in the Dark Place, a surreal dimension where thoughts and ideas become real. He destroys Jagger with the Clicker. Then, understanding that the story needs balance, he finishes Departure and frees Alice, which strands him in the Dark Place. His final line is "It's not a lake, it's an ocean."

  Two downloadable episodes pick up from there. In the first, The Signal, Zane tells Alan to follow a signal through a cell phone to stay focused. Television screens show a maniacal version of Alan who narrates dangers into existence and sends hordes of Taken after him. Alan also meets an ethereal Barry, a figment of his own subconscious who guides him across the shifting landscape. Zane then reveals the uncomfortable truth: the maniacal Alan is an irrational part of Alan himself, consumed by fear. Alan destroys a monstrous heap of televisions, only to wake in the cabin and find he is still trapped.

  In the second episode, The Writer, Alan accepts that he caused his own madness, and his memories return. Zane sends him toward a lighthouse while the irrational Alan conjures false visions of Alice and armies of Taken. Near the cabin, the imaginary Barry warns Alan that he must reject every illusion, including Barry himself. Alan defeats Taken versions of his friend and the townsfolk, enters the cabin, and touches the paranoid figure on the floor. The two halves become whole. Alan returns to the typewriter to begin a new story.

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• 3. Armed With Light

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  Every Taken wears a shield of darkness, and bullets alone cannot touch it. These enemies are people, animals and objects taken over by the darkness. They swing weapons that range from mallets and knives to shovels and chainsaws. Some are fast, some are large, and some can teleport short distances.

  Light burns the shield away. Only then can a revolver or shotgun do real damage. The flashlight beam doubles as the aiming reticle, and the player can boost it to strip darkness faster. Boosting drains the battery, and an empty flashlight needs a fresh battery or a slow recharge.

  The game has no traditional health bars. Aiming at an enemy raises a corona of light, and a circle inside it shrinks as the shield weakens. Stronger darkness can regrow if the light lets up. Once a Taken is destroyed, it simply disappears.

  Other tools follow the same logic. Flare guns, hand-held flares and flashbangs all push the darkness back, and searchlights can wipe out huge waves of enemies at once. Streetlights serve as safe havens that the Taken cannot enter, and they restore health faster. Even the car is a weapon, since its boosted headlights destroy Taken and the bumper can run them down. Flocks of possessed ravens and animated objects add to the assault, and a slow-motion dodge helps when enemies get close.

  The creators say the game does not sit squarely in the survival horror genre. Most of the action happens at night in places like a forest, a national park or a farm. Calmer daytime stretches break it up.

  The manuscript pages of Departure turn reading into part of the fight. They lie scattered out of order and often describe scenes that have not happened yet, which makes them both warning and instruction. Players can also hunt for 100 coffee thermos flasks, television sets that play episodes of a fictional series called Night Springs, and radios broadcasting the local station. Signs around town fill in the history and culture of Bright Falls.

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• 4. Five Years Lost

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  By 2003, Remedy had already made Max Payne in 2001 and its sequel, Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne. After shipping the sequel, the team spent time "recovering from the crunch" and began floating new concepts. One of them was Alan Wake. From the start it aimed for a deeper story than Max Payne, shaped by Stephen King and David Lynch, and it was framed as a television-style action thriller.

  Remedy also wanted the opposite of Max Payne's linear design. It planned Bright Falls as a free-roaming open world in the manner of the Grand Theft Auto series. The team built a semi-automatic tool that used biomes drawn from research on the Pacific Northwest. Lay a road across the map, and the tool cleared vegetation near it, sprouted grass along the edges and added roadside ditches.

  The gameplay was meant to be survival-driven. Players would gather resources by day, such as gasoline for portable generators, to power lights that protected them at night. According to creative director Sam Lake, this made it very hard to build a story that explained how the mechanics fit the supernatural events. One idea involved the volcano beneath Cauldron Lake waking up and forcing the evacuation of Bright Falls, leaving Alan alone with the supernatural.

  The game was announced at E3 2005 in June and shown to the press behind closed doors as a tech demo. By 2006, Remedy had partnered with Microsoft Game Studios to publish it for the Xbox 360 and Windows Vista. Microsoft's suggestions added to the strain, and Lake compared the situation to "too many cooks". The team kept missing publisher milestones.

  About three years in, Remedy stopped and took the lead from each department into what it called a "sauna" group. The group worked in one room, with "all the heat and pressure on us", to lock down the core gameplay. It took roughly two months. The result was a loop the team could lay over its existing open-world assets, cut into linear, chapter-sized levels. Some levels became daytime story scenes with characters to talk to. Others were night-time action. A few existed in both versions. That period also produced the Taken, the audio and visual signals that warn of their approach, and the lit safe havens between fights.

  Keeping the open-world map paid off. Lake said it gave the world "a sense of realness". Oskari Häkkinen, then head of franchise development, said the distant landmarks helped players find their way, allowed foreshadowing and held the world together.

  The hero was designed against Max Payne as well. Max was a cop, so he suited an action game. Alan was a writer, partly inspired by King, who gets pulled into the fighting. Late in development, Lake saw the story turning into a metaphor for the studio itself. Alan's earlier novels starred a police detective, much like Remedy's earlier games, and he now struggled to write something different.

  Enemy concept art was drawn and then doused in water so the monsters felt "Just a bit off". Every character was based on a real-life model. Ilkka Villi and Jonna Järvenpää, who modelled for Alan and Alice, were the only Finns among them.

  The Windows version was a different matter. After four years of demonstrating it, Remedy confirmed in 2009 that the game was Xbox 360 exclusive, and the PC decision rested with Microsoft.

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• 5. Pacific Northwest Borrowings

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  Over two weeks, a Remedy team drove about 2,000 miles through Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. They returned with more than 6,000 photographs and videos of nature and small-town Americana. Stops included Astoria, Oregon, and North Bend, Washington, where Twin Peaks was filmed, along with Seattle locations from the film The Ring. Back in Finland, the team still asked Microsoft, based in Washington, for more photographs.

  Twin Peaks is the biggest influence on the town itself. Bright Falls, like the series' own setting, is a small fictional town in Washington. Lake wanted the Lynchian blend of horror and absurd humour for the atmosphere. The television sets scattered around Bright Falls nod to Invitation to Love, the show within a show in Twin Peaks. Night Springs, the fictional series they play, references The Twilight Zone, created by Rod Serling in the late 1950s. It also echoes Address Unknown, a Twin Peaks-inspired show-within-the-game from the Max Payne titles.

  Stephen King is the other pillar. A writer whose work comes true is a theme King has explored in several books. Wake's narration alludes to him repeatedly, and the opening line quotes one of King's essays. Remedy asked King for permission. The game also includes a hedge maze resembling the one in the film The Shining, and an in-game car that resembles the one in King's novel Christine.

  Lake cited further influences, including Bret Easton Ellis, Neil Gaiman and Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. The attacking flocks of birds owe a debt to Alfred Hitchcock's film The Birds.

  King received copies of the game as a thank-you. He could not play them, because he does not own an Xbox.

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• 6. Season One

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  "Previously on Alan Wake..." opens every episode of the game, the way a recap opens a television drama. It is meant to refresh the player's memory and point to things that matter soon. The main game has six episodes, each with its own plot and a cliffhanger at the end. A different song plays over each episode's closing credits, again like a TV series.

  Remedy treated the main game and the two downloadable episodes as the "first season" of a larger story. The main game was built to end satisfyingly. The downloadable pair worked as a special that would "continue the fiction and serve as a bridge between seasons". The developers said they hoped to follow up with a second season or a sequel.

  The team chose the television format for its pacing. It admired how viewers could watch serialised shows like Lost on box sets at their own speed, and it praised Lost as a model for thriller pacing. Remedy had also wanted to release the episodes digitally, one at a time. Microsoft insisted on a full retail disc. Phil Spencer, head of Xbox Game Studios, said in 2020 that Microsoft feared sales would decline with each episode and thought a single release would earn more. He added that the company later judged this a likely mistake, because it pushed Microsoft toward a narrow way of thinking about monetisation.

  A live-action prequel filled in the town. The six-episode web series Bright Falls arrived a few weeks before the game, on the web and on Xbox Live. Phillip Van co-wrote and directed it. Its lead, a newspaper reporter named Jake Fischer, played by Christopher Forsyth, visits town to interview Dr. Hartman about his new book. Fischer soon suffers lost time and blackouts, wakes up in forests he never walked into, and grows averse to light and daytime. As his behaviour turns violent, he tries to duct-tape himself to a refrigerator and records himself sleeping. The series implies that the Dark Presence takes him over completely and that he murders several people. He then vanishes just before Alan and Alice arrive.

  Several characters appear in both the series and the game, including the diner waitress Rose and the radio host Pat Maine. Their actors also supplied voices and physical models for the game. Alan himself shows up briefly in the final episode. The crew filmed in rural Oregon and Washington to match the in-game locations.

  The story also spread into print. The collector's edition included a 144-page book called The Alan Wake Files. Rick Burroughs wrote a novelisation, and an art and making-of book titled Alan Wake: Illuminated also exists.

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• 7. Slow Burn

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  Alan Wake reached shelves in the same week as Red Dead Redemption, and it lost badly at first. NPD Group counted 145,000 units for Alan Wake in the first two weeks, against 1.5 million for the rival. The game had gone gold on the 7th of April 2010, which pulled the European release forward by a week. It arrived in Europe on the 14th of May 2010 and in North America on the 18th of May. Word of mouth then slowly lifted sales.

  Critics were largely warm, and Metacritic called the reviews generally favorable. Michael Plant of The Independent gave it 5/5 and praised its flawless pacing. Brian Crecente of Kotaku said he played the final episode three times in a row. Chris Kohler of Wired scored it 6/10 and wrote that it starts strong and finishes weak. Time magazine ranked it first in its top 10 video games of 2010. The score by Petri Alanko won Best Score - European at the 2010 Annual Game Music Awards.

  The downloadable episodes drew mixed notes. David Houghton of GamesRadar+ called The Signal one of the best parts of the game, and it came out on the 27th of July 2010. Erik Brudvig of IGN said The Writer, released on the 12th of October 2010, satisfyingly closed out the story, although he found both episodes pricey.

  The Windows version finally came on the 16th of February 2012. Remedy had won the rights in mid-2011, and a small team worked with the Finnish developer Nitro Games for about five months. Within 48 hours of its Steam launch, the studio announced that revenue had passed its development and marketing costs.

  Sales kept climbing. By the 13th of March 2012, Remedy announced more than 2 million copies across Xbox 360 and PC. On the 23rd of May 2013, Sam Lake said the game and its stand-alone follow-up had sold 3 million.

  Piracy was a quiet sign of its popularity. A report called it the second-most-illegally copied Xbox 360 game of 2010, with more than 1.1 million downloads. The game marks a pirated copy by giving the player character an eyepatch.

  The soundtrack added to the cult following. Songs include David Bowie's "Space Oddity" over the end credits and "War" by Poets of the Fall, who also performed as Old Gods of Asgard. Those licences expired, and in May 2017 the game vanished from every storefront. Remedy discounted it heavily beforehand. With Microsoft's help, the studio re-secured the rights, and the game returned to digital shelves by October 2018.

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• 8. Remedy Connected Universe

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  In May 2011, a leak forced Remedy to confirm it was working on a new Alan Wake project. It was not a full sequel. It became Alan Wake's American Nightmare, a short stand-alone game released in February 2012 on Xbox Live Arcade. The team had first looked at zombie and monster films like From Dusk till Dawn. Their wave-fighting sandbox idea became the Arcade mode, called "Fight Till Dawn", and the rest was worked into Alan's story with a Twilight Zone theme.

  A bigger sequel was drafted and then cancelled. Its ideas became the foundation of Remedy's next title, Quantum Break, which arrived in 2016.

  Alan Wake Remastered came out on the 5th of October 2021, co-developed by Remedy and D3T. It reached PlayStation consoles for the first time and arrived on Nintendo Switch on the 20th of October 2022. Remedy chose a remaster over a remake because changing the gameplay would cascade through the whole design. The team remade visual assets for 4K and replaced the original product placement, while keeping all of the licensed music. It added a commentary track by Sam Lake.

  Television has been tried too. Remedy and Contradiction Films announced a live-action series in September 2018, with Peter Calloway as showrunner and Lake as executive producer. In May 2022, AMC acquired the rights. After Remedy announced a partnership with Annapurna Pictures in August 2024, Remedy confirmed the AMC series was no longer in development. On the 30th of January 2024, Alan Wake became a playable survivor in Dead by Daylight. Epic Games also built a Fortnite Creative island called "Alan Wake: Flashback" that retells the first game.

  The most surprising connection runs through Control, released in 2019. Its Federal Bureau of Control works from the Oldest House in New York City and treats Bright Falls as an Altered World Event. Memos in the game mention Alan, the typewriter, the cabin and the Clicker. A paid expansion called "AWE", released in August 2020, reveals what happened to Hartman after Alan vanished. He dove into the lake himself, and the Dark Presence took over his body. Lake called it the first crossover event of the Remedy Connected Universe, which was to include Alan Wake 2. That sequel was released on the 27th of October 2023, published by Epic Games Publishing, as a survival horror game.

  The expansion ends with a warning for Control's heroine, Jesse. A new Altered World Event is coming to Bright Falls, but oddly, from a future date.

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