Interviews// Remedy's Oskari Häkkinen

But video games become old very quickly, which is unfortunate, and I completely understand that feeling. But from a technical and visual perspective, the game is still very current. The fact that it’s been out for just under two years shouldn’t matter, but unfortunately it does quite often. Again, it’s less about a commercial decision and more about the promise and it’s something that we needed to do for us.


SPOnG: How do you see the PC market faring at the moment? A lot of big name publishers and developers have started to switch focus to console. PC versions of multiplatform games are now released some months after other platforms, almost like an afterthought. Is the PC market still quite healthy do you think?

Oskari Häkkinen: PC gaming is still healthy, and I think it’s actually getting healthier with the help of different channels to get your games from. Origin, Good Old Games, Steam... having one centralised place where you can go pick up these games easily and you know it’s not going to be containing any malware. There’s a tonne of gamers out there who want the ease that Steam brings. On the other hand, the people who don’t want to get it from there will get it from somewhere else.

I think those services like Steam and Origin and so forth are keeping it healthier. As for delayed releases, there must be a number of reasons why that’s happening. Some of those reasons are commercial, some are demand. So, it’s a mix.


SPOnG: Onto Alan Wake’s American Nightmare... I remember the last time we had a chat about Alan Wake, you said that the game was like a TV series. Alan Wake is Season One, Alan Wake 2 is Season Two and the DLC episodes are like TV specials. Where does American Nightmare fit into that vision?

Oskari Häkkinen: Alan Wake’s American Nightmare is a stand-alone spin-off experience, which means that anyone can pick it up and play even if they’ve never played the first game. We feel that it’s an important step for the franchise. We hope that people who pick this up may get reintroduced to the first Alan Wake game and be more interested in the franchise as a whole.

The backstory goes that early on in Wake’s career, he had written a couple of Night Springs. Now, if you remember Night Springs from Alan Wake, it’s this in-game TV show which has this Twilight Zone feel to it. Now you’re playing an episode of Night Springs, as written by Alan Wake himself. So he’s learnt a lot since he went missing in Bright Falls. He’s able to use fiction to his advantage, and that’s what’s happening here instead of letting the fiction dictate what happens to him.


SPOnG: Why did you pick XBLA rather than focus on a disc release? It might seem like an obvious question but perhaps there’s a non-obvious answer to it.

Oskari Häkkinen: The inception of Alan Wake’s America Nightmare came about after Alan Wake and the DLCs and looking at what people were saying about the game. It was universally appreciated for its story and for the character, getting nominated for three BAFTAs and Time Magazine’s Game of the Year and various story awards.

But, what some reviewers and fans were saying was that it was perhaps a bit repetitive, and that they would have liked a bit more escalation in the weapons, enemies and action. For Alan Wake, we didn’t feel it would have done the game any justice. I think if all of a sudden Alan Wake, a writer - not a commando or space marine - is wielding an AK-47 and shooting big monsters, it’s going to take you out of the overall experience of what we were trying to deliver, which was a game that was grounded in reality.

But listening to them, we said to the team to whitebox out some levels and turn up the knobs and do crazy stuff. So they did, and in a short space of time we had this arcade action mode and all the people in the office were enjoying it. We didn’t have proper leaderboards coded in at that time, we just had a whiteboard where people were putting their top scores on.

And it’s weird because we’re a story-driven studio, and very focused on story. Actually, American Nightmare started with these arcade action modes with a Horde mode, which is very non-Remedy. We just thought it was kind of fun, and a perfect fit for XBLA. But, like I said, story is in our DNA, so Sam Lake, our lead writer and creative director, had the idea of framing it around an episode of Night Springs.


SPOnG: Was it a concept you had for Alan Wake 2, a DLC concept that never made it, or a fresh idea entirely?

Oskari Häkkinen: It was an entirely new, fresh concept. When you play American Nightmare you’ll notice that we’re not even in Pacific Northwest anymore - the team was a little bit done with modelling trees and wanted to do something different. Night Springs is in Arizona, so it’s a very different landscape. It’s very new, though, it’s all new stuff. Very fresh and different to the first game.

And also our inspirations are different this time around. Inspired by grindhouse, and Quentin Tarantino, From Dusk Til Dawn... It’s got some sci-fi, B-Movie Americana feel to it, so very different to Alan Wake.


SPOnG: How about gameplay wise? Obviously it retains a lot of the core mechanics from the first Alan Wake, but did you look to anything else for inspiration due to the grindhouse style? Was there anything in survival horror games - like Splatterhouse or Smash TV - that you had in mind, due to the arcade nature of the game?

Oskari Häkkinen: Games? Generally, we’ve always been blatant about telling everybody that, while we play a lot of video games, we don’t take inspiration from them. We take inspiration from popular culture like movies and books, TV and graphic novels. That’s where we look. We borrow from there and create our own versions of how we interpret certain fictions, and then bring that into video games.