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Alan Wake Interview: Pt 1
We talk exclusively to Remedy's Oz Hakkinen about his forthcoming action thriller.
Written by Jon Denton, 02 March 2010
During our recent hands-on session with Alan Wake, we sat down with Remedy's Oz Hakkinen to talk about the game's development process.
GZ: What influences have gone into the project?
Oz Hakkinen: We don't take a lot of inspiration from games, so to speak. We don't look at other videogames as a source of inspiration but we do definitely look into other pop culture like movies, books, graphic novels, TV series and alike. Lost is certainly an inspiration, not from a plot perspective, but what Lost do really well is a tightly paced thriller in a TV series type format, and that's definitely an inspiration.
360Zine Issue 43
For our latest Alan Wake coverage, click here to download 360Zine Issue 43 for free.We tip our hats to some of the greats. There's a bit of Hitchcock in there, with the birds attacking. Certainly an echo of Twin Peaks in Bright Falls, we've taken a lot of inspiration there, and Cauldron Lake is basically modelled after Crater Lake in the Pacific North West, Steven King of course - a writer whose work is coming true.
So, Sam Lake, our writer, is very much into popular culture and he's taken a lot of influences from there - in the game you'll see a hedge maze, from the shining obviously, there's a lot of those, a lot of moments you'll say 'ok I've seen this somewhere else'. What happens with that is that it resonates really well, and you can't quite put your finger on why you're scared, or what emotions that it's pulling out of you... you've seen it somewhere else. It can be the music or it can be the way we use the camera, it's kinda like 'the knife on the table, then you pull away, go back and there's something missing'. You only realise it's the knife when the action happens. So we take a lot of influences from popular culture like that.
GZ: With the promise of DLC and an episodic structure, will players be getting a complete story in the box?
OH: This game is season one of a TV series. This season, like any season of a TV series, will have a satisfactory and a conclusive ending. We've always thought of Alan Wake to be a larger story than just one game, it's been a long development process of five years, and it just makes sense for us to make a larger story out of this, and we have ideas, we have it pretty much mapped out of how it's going to go. How those exact thing fall into place after this game we're not sure, but season one will certainly have a satisfactory and conclusive ending. We'll leave some doors ajar, leave you thinking as well 'what happened to that character' or 'what happened here'. We've announced that we're going to some DLC, we've been fully focused on this so our DLC project is not going to start until a few weeks from now when we've had local hand-off to Microsoft for all the localisations and so forth, then we'll start working on the DLC. So think of the DLC - in TV series terminology, like special episodes, like a Christmas special, easter special. So hopefully it'll be a bridge to - if it's a success - to season 2.
I'd love to tell you how it's going to end, but I'll leave that for you to play. It's written in stone that this is a satisfactory ending. The player won't feel cheated out of an ending. They'll definitely feel that they've reached their goals, what the game had promised at the start, they'll feel satisfied with the story at that moment, it'll leave them wanting more, but this season one is a packaged story. Just as in Lost or in 24, you feel satisfied when you've ended season one, an you're ready for season 2, but you're not annoyed that season 2 takes a long time, rather you're satisfied with that first experience.
Alan Wake coverage available in 360Zine Issue 43 - click here to download it for free!
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