Interviews// Alan Wake: Remedy's Oskari Häkkinen

SPOnG: Where did the idea for the Pacific Northwest setting come from? It has a sort of X-Files and Twin Peaks feel to it. Were those kinds of shows the inspiration you used for Alan Wake?

Oskari Häkkinen: Well, we didn't use any influences from video games. Our inspiration has come from popular culture. There's certainly an echo of Twin Peaks at Bright Falls, of Stephen King – the writer who's stories become true – and we tip our hats to some of the greats. The birds attacking you there's all a bit Hitchcock, the axe through the door's referencing The Shining... we even have a hedge maze in the game.

We have a lot of popular culture things that will resonate well with the player and you'll sit there and realise, “hold on, I think I know what's going to happen here” or “I recognise this setting.” And that's because we've taken a lot from various sources and that hasn't really been done a lot in video games before.


SPOnG: In many ways, Alan Wake runs quite contrary to the trends in video games. A writer as a protagonist, no multiplayer, brand new IP, with probably a self-contained story. Did that come up with discussions with Microsoft?

Oskari Häkkinen: I think that what we're good at doing at Remedy is story-driven-cinematic-movie-like-action-games. That was a bit of a mouthful, wasn't it? I'm surprised at myself that I said all that so quickly (laughs).

But going through a checklist of things that you're supposed to put in a game – like, we have to put multiplayer in, we have to put this and that in – it just wasn't something that we wanted to do. We're in a fortunate position where we own the IP, so we can control what was going to be done to it.

We could have put in multiplayer, but there are so many studios out there that make fantastic multiplayer games already. That's what they do, they know how to do multiplayer, and it's not where our core competence is. Our core competence is in this story-driven experience where we bring real characters to life. We just don't want to stray away too far from that core dynamic of what Remedy is all about.

The Remedy brand should be a seal of quality and should stand for something – and there should be a progression from what Max Payne was into Alan Wake. There's some similarities between the two, and we haven't forgotten our heritage.

We've taken some of the things we learnt from the Max Payne games and evolved them into Alan Wake. So we do use active cameras as well – rather than have bullet time, in a thriller game such as this we manipulate the angles in other ways. If you're being attacked from behind the camera pans out and gives you a bit of a 'hunter and the hunted' feel.

Generally though it gives you a bit more reaction time to escape, and that core element was carried over from Max Payne. There's also a dodge move that you can perform, which triggers a cinematic dodge if you time it right – that feels really rewarding, and accentuates that thriller moment. It's not bullet time, but it is a method of creating a sense of suspense and action relative to the genre. So that's another area from movies that we've taken influences from too.


SPOnG: How long do you guys plan to make Alan Wake episodic for? Was it something you've planned from the very beginning or was it an idea you thought of later on in development?

Oskari Häkkinen: Quite early on in the development stage, we realised that we wanted to make a thriller game, with loads of story arcs and angles. But for a video game, if you go for a story structure that works like a movie, you end up having to leave secondary and tertiary elements behind otherwise you dilute the core story.

And that's not to say that the disc itself is short; the length of the game itself is very satisfying to the player and it's comparable to other action games out there. But with a story like Alan Wake you can at one point reach the peak of the story arc, and we realised you can't just keep peaking and peaking.

But we decided that the 'TV Series' style structure worked well for us, because we can have many story arcs. In a thriller, that allows us to have a daytime scene at some point in the episode, which is very serene and is more about NPC interaction and learning about character motives.

Those events might foreshadow things that take place in the nighttime scene, which is more action oriented. We can end with a cliffhanger, and then the next episode can again start off with a more serene point. It allows us to keep that engagement and immersion into the story in terms of the thriller genre.


SPOnG: I guess any potential sequel could be seen as a new 'season' of the Alan Wake show, in a sense.

Oskari Häkkinen: Good catch! Absolutely! You can consider this as 'Season One' of a TV series, so to speak. And just like a series boxset, when people play through the disc game, they'll have a satisfactory and conclusive ending – but there will be some doors left open.

We've always thought of Alan Wake as a bigger story than just the one game. I know we've announced some DLC, but work on that won't start until we've truly polished off the disc release. The DLC will more likely act as a bridge between 'Season Two', if the first game is a success. It won't be so much a direct continuation of the main story.


SPOnG: Thank you for your time.

Oskari Häkkinen: Thanks a lot!