  Best-selling horror writer Alan Wake becomes trapped in a nightmare in the Twin Peaks-inspired video game of the same name. |
SAN FRANCISCO — For years, game developers have been trying to make video games feel more like movies. Maybe they should be making games feel more like TV shows instead.
Remedy Entertainment, the Finland-based game studio behind the blockbuster Max Payne titles, is wrapping up their six-years-in-the-making Alan Wake, a psychological action-thriller bound for the Xbox 360 this May.
While Remedy is striving for a cinematic feel with Alan Wake, lead writer Sam Lake says trying to make a video game that can last for 20 or more hours feel like a movie just doesn’t make sense.
“You end up stretching certain plot points quite thin,” Lake said at the recent X10 event in San Francisco, where developers were showing off their upcoming Xbox 360 titles. “I was trying to look for a good model for a game,” Lake said. “I do watch a lot of TV, and a season of a TV series felt like a perfect match in length.
“You can crank up on the tension and then ease up back again. That kind of keeps the flow of it alive and interesting, and that’s a very important part of building a thriller.”
Alan Wake tells the story of its titular character, a best-selling horror novelist who’s been hobbled with writer’s block. He visits the picturesque Washington town of Bright Falls with his wife, Alice, to rest, relax and forget about work for a while.
But when Alice goes missing, Wake suddenly finds himself trapped in a nightmare that may be of his own creation, with events unfolding according to the scattered pages of a manuscript he doesn’t remember writing. When the sun sets on Bright Falls, creatures shrouded in darkness come for Wake, and even inanimate objects take on a sinister — and lethal — life of their own.
If it sounds like something out of a Stephen King book, that’s because the horror-meister’s novels were a source of inspiration for Lake and the rest of the Finns working on Alan Wake. As were the TV shows Lost, The X-Files and that early ’90s bastion of weirdness, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks.
(Interestingly, Alan Wake will be the second Xbox 360 game coming out this year to draw inspiration from Twin Peaks. The so-bad-it’s-good horror game Deadly Premonition also pays homage to the series, with an oddball FBI agent investigating gruesome murders in a quirky Pacific Northwest town.)
During the daytime, Wake will primarily be talking to people and investigating his wife’s disappearance and the deeper mysteries behind it. At night is when the action kicks in, with Wake using firearms combined with sources of light — flares, car headlights, his trusty flashlight and so on — to fight the shadowy critters.
Each day-and-night cycle will make up roughly one in-game episode, dividing Alan Wake into chunks akin to a TV series. Lake says gamers will have the option of quickly skimming through the story-heavy daytime segments, sort of the equivalent of hitting fast forward on your PVR.
“It’s up to the player if they want to explore and dig deep into the backstory,” Lake said. “They are free to do that, and there is that kind of deeper content in there.
“But at the same time, if some of the players just want to grab the flashlight and the gun and go forward with the action, they still get the skeleton of the thriller if you will. It should be their decision.”
Max Payne a changed man
The father of Max Payne doesn’t seem too troubled that his creation has abandoned the urban jungle of Manhattan for the literal jungle of Brazil.
Max Payne 3, being developed by the Rockstar Vancouver game studio, is the first title in the series not to be handled by Finland-based Remedy Entertainment, who are currently working on the upcoming Alan Wake. The new game will see Max undergoing a transformation from hardboiled, well-dressed New York City cop to, well, a bald, bushy guy in a wifebeater.
Remedy’s Sam Lake not only wrote the first two Max Payne instalments, he was the face model for the game’s original character. If anyone has a right to feel protective of Max, it’s him.
But Lake seems rather unfazed that Rockstar has turned Max into a bald, bearded, scarred and somewhat paunchy dude doing battle in the sun-baked slums of Sao Paolo, Brazil. That’s a long, long way from the dark, snowy alleyways of NYC.
“They have certainly made it their own, and it’s a good thing in my opinion,” Lake said. “The Rockstar guys make very, very good games, and I’m looking forward to actually playing it
and seeing what they have come up with.”
steve.tilley@sunmedia.ca
