SPOnG: Should American Nightmare do quite well or is positively received, do you think you could transfer some of those new arcade-style gameplay elements over to an Alan Wake 2?
Oskari Häkkinen: Well, we’ve got nothing to announce on Alan Wake 2. I think if American Nightmare is successful, it’s a lot more focused on action than Alan Wake was, and a little less story - and the story that is there is a lot more pulp fiction. It’s a pulp action adventure, with a five-hour story and the arcade action mode.
But you know, the cool thing about digital is you can actually see what the reactions of people are, and you can react to those. Certainly, let the gamer vote with his wallet and say if they really like this and they want more of it, perhaps we could do more.
And sure, this is less of us pushing the envelope in storytelling in video games than Alan Wake was. This is more made for the pick-up-and-play medium. We’ll see, we’re definitely learning stuff from this as well. Every game that we make is a learning curve.
SPOnG: If people turned around and said they wanted more of this kind of experience, how would you go about doing that? Hypothetically, you’re talking more of a sequel to American Nightmare right? It’s too different to the core Alan Wake experience to have those features implemented in a true sequel, surely.
Oskari Häkkinen: No, I think certainly Alan Wake is more grounded in reality. Everything that’s crazy and wild about what’s going on here is okay because it’s an episode of Night Springs. But out of this Night Springs context, it’s again quite grounded in reality.
But Wake goes forward - he’s learnt a lot already. He’s learning to use fiction to his advantage by using some fiction that he had previously written to stop his evil double, Mr. Scratch. Mr. Scratch is born after the events of what happened in Bright Falls - we know that in Bright Falls fiction, it can come real, and when the dust is settled and Wake had gone missing, the locals started to talk about Alan Wake who was this rock star writer, that brutally murdered his wife in a cabin. That’s not what happened, but that’s how the urban legend goes.
Then Bright Falls fiction becomes real and Mr. Scratch is born. He wears the face of Alan Wake, he’s his evil double and he’s after Alice Wake. Wake’s trying to stop him and he’s using Night Springs as a funnel to stop him.
Oskari Häkkinen: Probably not, no.
SPOnG: Finally, I have to ask about Max Payne. How do you feel about the way Rockstar is handling the franchise right now?
Oskari Häkkinen: I think they’re handling it really well. They’ve been kind enough to show us the game and ask our opinion on it, and we’ve been giving some feedback on it. It’s looking absolutely phenomenal. It’s been a nice position to be in, because you can give feedback on a game without having to do the heavy lifting yourself. But it’s a real sequel, and it’s a really fine sequel at that. It’s a great next step for the game franchise. They’ve really kept the core elements of what is a Max Payne game, but at the same time bringing it up to speed with what people expect from modern games today.
Oskari Häkkinen: Very much the same, in many senses of it. Not all, but many.
SPOnG: Thank you very much for your time.
Oskari Häkkinen: Thanks!
Alan Wake is released on PC today. Alan Wake’s American Nightmare is scheduled for an Xbox Live Arcade release next week.[/i]