The Alan Wait is over – Alan Wake 2 is out now

Right now, it feels like I’ve been trapped in the Dark Place for the past 13 years. No, that’s a lie. It feels much longer than that. Forever. The game is done. Alan Wake 2 is finally emerging into the light. It’s real. For the longest time it was just fiction. And now the fiction has come true. It’s all meta and metaphors, hopelessly, and very purposefully, entangled. This has been a very personal project for me. I’m very proud of all the Remedy games we’ve made, but all through the way, I cared deeply about this one. More so than any other game. Maybe too much, if you can care too much about something you are creating. With that I felt an urge, almost as if on a dare, to keep pushing the ambition on the story, on storytelling, on the use of different mediums, on the interactive nature of it, on the stylization, on all of it, as far as I could imagine we could go. I feel we went pretty far. I feel we have made a Remedy game and a story we can be proud of. A Remedy game that’s perhaps more a Remedy game than any game before it.

Making games is teamwork. It’s very true with Alan Wake 2. And what a team. I’m deeply grateful to all of them. I’m in awe of the talent of my partners in crime here at Remedy, and the extended Alan Wake 2 family, the brilliant actors and musicians all included. How they joined me on this journey. How they took all the crazy ideas, iterated on them to make them much better, and worked hard to turn them into this game. How they brought their own wonderful ideas, large and small, into the mix. We made this happen, all of us together. By industry standards, it’s not a huge team, 130 people or so at Remedy. And the game is bigger and more complex than any previous game we have made. Sometimes, you hear people say that something happened because of the circumstances around it. I feel we made this game despite the circumstances around it. To begin with, we started the production of this project in the middle of the Covid lockdown. Reality is never a creator’s paradise. In this case, it’s truer than in many others. But overcoming those obstacles, finding ways to work around the limitations, has made this more precious and hard earned than without them. And in some cases, the limitations that forced us to be creative, led us to solutions that were better than our initial plans.

This game is made of ideas that excited us, that we felt passionate about. It’s been crafted with love and care for you, dear player, for you to enjoy if this is your first Remedy game, and for you if you have played all our precious games. Welcome (back) to the world of Alan Wake, and to Remedy Connected Universe. Thank you for your patience over the past 13 years. We hope it was worth the wait.

I feel I have very little more to say. I’ve enthusiastically said a lot in the hundred interviews I’ve given as part of this campaign. And written a lot in the hundreds of pages of screenplay for the game itself. More than with any previous game, I feel playing this, you will see what it looks like inside my head and in my dreams. I hope you enjoy it. And find it disturbing in a very entertaining way.

It’s been a long journey. I don’t think the fact that this game is done has really, truly sunk in yet. I know it’s done, but I don’t feel it yet. It will take some time. While you are playing, we will take some time off to rest, and then, I hope, find new dreams to dream.

Espoo, Oct 27
Sam Lake
Creative Director
Remedy