Remedy Entertainment

• 1. Introduction

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  Remedy Entertainment, a Finnish video game developer, began in a basement in the Westend district of Espoo. According to creative director Sam Lake, mattresses were strewn across the floor, because team members sometimes slept there. Decades later, the same company is listed on a stock exchange and has worked with Rockstar Games, Microsoft and Epic Games. How did a group of programmers in their early twenties, trained on computer demonstrations rather than games, build a studio with that reach? Why did one of its most admired games take years to appear and then struggle to earn a follow-up? And what happens to a studio known for rare, carefully made single-player stories when it tries to make more games, more often?

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• 2. Demoscene Roots

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  In 1994, members of the demoscene group Future Crew looked at Bloodhouse and Terramarque, Finland's first commercial game developers, and saw a path they could follow. The demoscene was a community that built showpiece programs for personal computers and for Commodore's Amiga. Future Crew realised that their group would never turn into a company by itself. So they decided to found one called Remedy and began recruiting other people with a demoscene background.

  The founding members were Samuli Syvähuoko, Markus Mäki, Sami Nopanen, John Kavaleff and Sami Vanhatalo. The company was officially established on the 18th of August 1995. Most of the team were only in their early twenties.

  Their first idea was a racing game, known at first as HiSpeed. Scott Miller, the founder of Apogee Software, offered creative input and suggested that the cars should fight each other. Renamed Death Rally, the game was released by Apogee in 1996.

  The game needed dialog, so Remedy's Petri Järvilehto contacted a long-time friend. That friend was Sam Lake, who was then studying English literature at the University of Helsinki. Lake stayed on after the project and would eventually become the studio's creative director.

  In 1997 the team also built Final Reality, a benchmarking tool. The people behind it later spun off as a sister company named Futuremark.

  A letter dated the 9th of July 1998 then arrived from LucasArts, sent through its attorney John Sullivan. It threatened legal action and claimed that Remedy's logo had been copied from the top part of the LucasArts logo. Remedy was already redesigning the logo, because the old one did not reflect the company. The old version came off the website that July and was replaced by a question mark. The new design, by Kiia Kallio, was unveiled on the 29th of April 1999.

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• 3. Making Max Payne

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  After Death Rally, Remedy pitched three ideas to Scott Miller. One was a space flight simulation in the style of Descent: FreeSpace, one was another racing game, and one was an isometric shooter named Dark Justice. Miller chose to fund the shooter on three conditions. It needed a strong central character like Duke Nukem, 3D graphics, and a better name, since he felt Dark Justice sounded too "dark" and "adult".

  The team tried everything from "Dick Justice" to "Max Heat". They trademarked Max Heat for $20,000 before settling on "Max Payne".

  Petri Järvilehto, the lead designer, wanted bullet time to be the core mechanic. Slow motion was a hallmark of Hong Kong action films, and the team positioned it as a resource that players could spend. Their demoscene expertise in computing let them craft their own game engine. Sam Lake was appointed writer and brought in elements of crime fiction and film noir.

  In 1999 the designers travelled from Finland to New York to research the city. Two former New York Police Department bodyguards accompanied them while they took thousands of photographs for mapping. The artists had at first strongly resisted using real photos as textures. The company spent most of 2000 refining the graphics and delayed the release twice. Max Payne arrived in July 2001 to critical acclaim, praised for putting story and atmosphere ahead of gameplay alone. It sold more than seven million copies.

  Apogee had outsourced the console versions to Rockstar Games. Rockstar's parent company, Take-Two Interactive, spent $10 million to buy the rights to the franchise. The agreement also brought Remedy back to make a sequel, and Take-Two gave the team plenty of creative freedom.

  The sequel's development cycle was much shorter, and the team expanded most of the existing mechanics. Lake studied screenwriting at the Theatre Academy of Finland so that he could write a more "ambitious" story. His script ran to more than 600 pages, five times the length of the original.

  Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne was released in October 2003-27 months after its predecessor. Critics praised it, but it sold poorly. Take-Two cited its "continued disappointing sales" as one reason for forecasting a drop in revenue for 2004. Remedy then left the franchise, though Rockstar consulted the studio when Max Payne 3 reached the final stage of production.

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• 4. The Alan Wake Gamble

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  Seven years on one franchise left the team hungry for something new. They began prototyping gameplay mechanics with a sandbox game in mind. Limited resources made an open world unrealistic, so they refocused the project as a linear experience.

  Stephen King's novels, the television series Twin Peaks, ghost towns of the American Northwest and tornado patterns all shaped the world. The team even invited a landscape architect to act as consultant. They took a field trip to the Northwest and Crater Lake, returning with more than 40,000 photographs for the environment.

  The game spent more than three years in pre-production, while full development lasted about two years. During that stretch the studio grew from 30 employees to 45. It also vanished from public view for so long after its announcement that some media outlets suspected it had become vapourware.

  Microsoft Game Studios published the game after securing an exclusivity deal with Remedy. Alan Wake reached the Xbox 360 in May 2010 to generally positive reviews. Remedy pushed for a PC version, and Microsoft approved it in mid-2011. Nitro Games helped develop that version, which came out in February 2012.

  The game sold more than 3.2 million copies. In 2013, Remedy explained that this was still not profitable enough to raise the money for a sequel. That was a particular disappointment because, unlike Max Payne, Alan Wake's story had been written to allow several sequels.

  The company had begun building prototypes for Alan Wake 2, and some of their elements found a home in Alan Wake's American Nightmare. That 2012 standalone Xbox Live Arcade game had a much shorter development cycle. Together the two games had sold more than 4.5 million copies by March 2015.

  Remedy took its Alan Wake 2 prototype to several different publishers.

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• 5. Quantum Break and Northlight

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  Microsoft, the one publisher that had no interest in an Alan Wake sequel, still wanted another project with Remedy. It asked for an original property instead. Alan Wake had already experimented with transmedia storytelling, and Microsoft hoped the next game would stretch its live-action side further.

  Pre-production on Quantum Break began in 2011, with approximately 100 people involved. The idea of quantum physics came from Quantum Suicide, the television show that exists inside the world of Alan Wake. The team decided that time travel was the best fit for the storytelling structure.

  The result was described as a "transmedia action-shooter video game and television hybrid". Sam Lake directed the game, while Lifeboat Productions produced the television component, directed by Ben Ketai. Quantum Break received generally positive reviews in 2016. Microsoft declared it the best-selling original property it had released since the arrival of the Xbox One, and as of 2021 the rights remain with Microsoft.

  The game was also the first to run on the Northlight Storytelling Engine, a multi-platform engine built by Remedy. Lake said that narrative had been key to Max Payne and Alan Wake, but the studio needed its own technology to support it better. Part of the push came from the cancelled Alan Wake 2 prototype around 2013, which ran on the earlier Alan Wake engine and limited its storytelling.

  Building on that prototype's technology, Remedy added highly detailed human faces and bodies animated through motion capture. It also created a physically based renderer supporting global illumination, ray tracing and particle lighting. A real-time deterministic physics system could calculate environmental effects, play them back, or rewind them to produce large-scale interactive destruction.

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• 6. Going Public

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  Remedy's first step into mobile games was a remake of Death Rally for iOS and Android. It took eight months to build, in collaboration with Mountain Sheep and Cornfox & Brothers. Remedy spent only $10,000 on marketing, yet more than 11 million players downloaded it. The team recouped its budget in three days, and Lake called it only the company's "first step" into mobile.

  In 2013, the board of directors gained Mike Capps, a former president of Epic Games, and Christian Fredriksson, chief executive of the security firm F-Secure. Late that year Remedy announced Agents of Storm, a tower defence game for iOS made with the German publisher Flaregames. It was released in late 2014.

  Management changed between 2015 and 2016. Chief executive Matias Myllyrinne left to join Wargaming, and Tero Virtala, a former chief executive of RedLynx, replaced him after an interim period under Markus Mäki. Virtala was hired to turn Remedy into a multi-project studio with shorter development cycles. In 2017 the company held an initial public offering and listed on the NASDAQ First North Finland exchange, raising money to run projects at the same time.

  One of those projects was the single-player part of Smilegate's free-to-play shooter Crossfire 2, later renamed CrossfireX. Its predecessor, Crossfire, was among the highest-grossing video games of all time by 2016.

  Remedy's own next project carried the codename P7. 505 Games supported marketing and publishing and added a fund of €7.75 million. The game, Control, was released on the 27th of August 2019 for PlayStation 4, Windows and Xbox One. It was Remedy's first game for a Sony platform since Max Payne 2. Control sold over two million units by March 2021 and won several awards.

  In September 2018, a television show based on Alan Wake was announced, with Lake attached as executive producer. In July 2019, Remedy fully acquired the publishing rights to Alan Wake from Microsoft, including a one-time royalty payment based on the series' performance.

  March 2020 brought a two-game publishing deal with Epic Games, both titles in the same franchise. Remedy would keep full creative control and the intellectual property, and Epic would cover development costs. After Epic recouped its backing, the two companies would split profits 50-50. The larger game belongs to a shared universe linking Alan Wake and Control, an idea Lake said he had held for ten years. He pointed to Max Payne references inside Alan Wake and Quantum Break teasing elements of Alan Wake. The smaller title was Alan Wake Remastered, released in October 2021. The larger one, Alan Wake 2, entered full production in August 2021 and was released in October 2023.

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• 7. Partners and Setbacks

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  In May 2021, Tencent bought a 3.8% stake in Remedy from shares sold by Accendo Capital, which still held 14%. That December the two companies announced an online game published by Tencent under the codename Vanguard. A small 15-person team for multiplayer and live titles had carried that name since 2018. The game was first planned as free-to-play. In November 2023 it became a premium-price title under the codename Kestrel, and by May 2024 Remedy and Tencent agreed to cancel it so Remedy could focus on its existing properties.

  Remedy planned a second studio in Sweden for the first half of 2022. Working through the COVID-19 pandemic had shown a need for a hybrid work model for its Sweden-based staff. In April 2022 the company also announced that, with funding from Rockstar Games, it was remaking Max Payne and Max Payne 2 in the Northlight engine. Those remakes target PlayStation 5, Windows and Xbox Series X/S.

  February 2024 saw Remedy buy all rights to Control from 505 Games for €17 million. In August it announced a "strategic cooperation agreement" with Annapurna Pictures. Annapurna would co-produce Control 2, pay 50% of its development costs, and hold options for film and television projects involving Alan Wake and Control. The following month, Tencent agreed to a €15 million convertible loan, which could convert into around 6% of the company and lift Tencent's stake to 20%.

  By June 2025, Remedy had grown its headcount by 6.6% to 385 employees. On the 17th of June 2025 it released FBC: Firebreak, a multiplayer standalone game based on Control. The game failed to meet sales expectations, and Remedy expected a negative profit for the year. In October 2025, chief executive Tero Virtala voluntarily stepped down.

  Remedy's list of games also includes Control Resonant, due in 2026, with Annapurna Pictures as co-producer and financer.

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• 8. Culture and Home

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  Matias Myllyrinne, then managing director, once listed what the studio would avoid. His examples were "World War II, dragons, hardcore sci-fi, or women with tight leather outfits". Remedy games, he said, always have a strong lead character, and they must be "approachable" and relatable so that they can appeal to the largest possible audience. The team aimed for "movie realism", where real-world believability mattered.

  Its inspiration came mostly from movies, television and books rather than other video games, because the team wanted something unique to the industry. Development always began with the story, which then guided gameplay and everything else. Most games were linear, though around 2015 the studio started exploring multiplayer and open-ended ideas. It relied on its own in-house technology, invested heavily in motion capture, and partnered with Nvidia to streamline that process.

  Starting in 2016, the multi-project approach was meant to make the company more financially secure and let team members choose which projects they joined. It also brought work-for-hire jobs such as the single-player part of CrossfireX, part of a plan to reach new genres and new parts of the world. Virtala insisted that a Remedy launch would still be "rare" and that quality would not suffer.

  Before 2018, the company worked from a four-story office in Espoo with a café, a sauna, a bar and a gym. It also held a "development warehouse" full of past projects. Photos and graphic novels from Max Payne sat beside clothes from Alan Wake, old computers, design documents, demo video tapes and early scripts. In May 2018, Remedy moved to a bigger office, also in Espoo, with a motion capture floor four times larger than the original. By December 2019 it employed more than 250 people from 30 different countries.

  GamesIndustry.biz named Remedy one of its 2019 People of the Year after the successful launch of Control, its first title since the public listing. The same year, Hideo Kojima, known as the father of the Metal Gear series, visited the studio during a trip to Finland. He has said he is a huge fan of Control.

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