Alan Wake II video game writer is in the game, too, but with some twists
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Sam Lake and his Alan Wake II character Alex Casey. Photo illustration: Annelise Capossela/Axios. Photos courtesy of Remedy Entertainment.
Sam Lake didn't just write Alan Wake II, the new survival horror game from Remedy Entertainment. He's in it, playing FBI agent Alex Casey, a character who, in another twist, shares the same name — and maybe more — with a fictional detective featured in books written by in-game novelist Alan Wake.
Why it matters: It's all supposed to be a bit confusing in the latest game from Remedy. The studio has been building a following for decades in part by blending layers of reality.
- Its newest release, Alan Wake II, is out Friday. In the game, players split their time playing as Casey's partner, FBI investigator Saga Anderson, and Alan Wake, as they investigate killings and try to survive in a world seemingly gone mad.
What they're saying: "It just felt like an opportunity that couldn't be missed with all the meta layers going on," Lake tells Axios, of his decision to go beyond serving as the game's creative director and playing Casey.
- Lake had just sat through a playthrough of a brief portion of the game in which Wake is confronted by Casey, whose face and body is based on Lake's. (Other actors, Matthew Porretta and James McCaffrey, did the voicework for Wake and Casey, respectively).
- "I've learned a ton, especially about directing and writing, by having to be on the other side of this," Lake said. The process made him appreciate the challenge "from the actors' perspective of shifting from one emotion to another."
The big picture: Remedy's playful blending of real and fictional, an unusual signature element for a game studio, can be traced to 2001's Max Payne, in which a photo of Lake was the basis for Payne's face.
- In 2010's Alan Wake, a thriller centered on the question of whether Wake was writing the horrors of his books into reality, Lake appeared as himself as the guest of an in-game talk show.
- Remedy's 2016 sci-fi game Quantum Break intercut playable chapters with 20-minute live-action scenes starring the same characters and recorded in multiple ways. (Alan Wake II is not structured this way, but does include "a feature film's worth of live action" content, Lake says.)
- Remedy's 2019 hit Control established an official "Remedy Connected Universe," name-checking Casey and eventually featuring an expansion about Alan Wake.
Between the lines: Remedy's experimentation has earned it loyal fans, but Lake says it took three major tries to get the sequel greenlit.
- Original publisher Microsoft passed after the first Alan Wake released, preferring something new, he says. A second pitch morphed into Control.
- The third attempt found backing in Epic Games, which published a remaster of the original and this week's sequel, which began production in 2019.
- Lake and co-director Kyle Rowley credit an uptick in interest in horror games thanks to the success of the 2019 release of a Capcom's Resident Evil 2 Remake, as well as renewed industry enthusiasm for the kind of single-player adventures Remedy specializes in. Lake name-checks the success of Sony solo blockbusters like 2018's God of War for that.
The intrigue: One other layer of reality-warping to consider is that "Sam Lake" isn't a real name. The creative director's last name is really Järvi, which means "lake" in his native Finnish.
- When reporters struggled early in Remedy's run with getting his team's Finnish last names right, Sam Järvi switched to a pseudonym that's proved real enough.
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