Before The Sudden Stop focused on Remedy's entire catalogue, it was a much smaller site which focused on just the Alan Wake series, after all the site was built in 2011. So it's always extremely exciting to receive some Alan Wake news again after so long, even if it's just to report the continual interest the studio has to return for a sequel.
On Monday, we reported about the new IGN First interview in which IGN's Ryan McCaffrey sat down with Sam Lake (Creative Director at Remedy) at E3 2019 to discuss his long history and journey with the company.
As a fan of Alan Wake, Ryan wanted to bring up the prospect of Remedy working on a sequel, which is something that Sam revealed that he continues to want to work on the project even though with the anticipation and time since the cult classic's launch, the bar is set much higher.
The conversation went pretty in-depth, spanning approximately ten minutes as Alan Wake's growing audience, the expectations, the prior attempts at prototypes, and Remedy's approach was all discussed.
In the interview, Sam was asked whether he still had an interest in pursuing an Alan Wake 2 or if too much time had passed and the studio and himself wanted to focus on new adventures. "No, I want to make it. It's a curious thing, like I've said, at this point, so much time having passed, I feel that the bar is higher in some ways. It needs to be done right, if it's ever done and everything needs to click into place which is really hard to make happen. So many things for these big games to be greenlit. So many things need to be aligned. But I'm hoping that someday. The funny thing is that personally, on and off, ever since the first game, I've been working on the sequel. I haven't said this publically but between each project, after the first game, I and we, with a small team, we created a concept for the sequel."
Sam goes on to explain how the concepts for some of those potential sequels worked themselves into influencing titles like Alan Wake's American Nightmare, Quantum Break and Control, "well actually before [American Nightmare], but then we realised that this isn't going forwards and some of those ideas went into Quantum Break and some of those ideas went into a reduced, more scaled-down way, went into American Nightmare. Then coming out of Quantum Break, we created a concept for- a new concept, very different, for Alan Wake 2. And we were looking at it, we were talking about it with potential partners. Ultimately we came to the conclusion it doesn't quite feel like Alan Wake. This was me and Miksu, Mikael Kasurinen, who is the Game Director, and the Director of Control. We created this together and we decided that we'll just do a new IP. We'll take these ideas and we'll put them into a new IP and that became Control."
If you haven't done so, make sure to also check out the interview in full. Both Sam's and Ryan's enthusiasm is wonderful. You can check out the full interview, below:
27th July 2019
IGN Talks Alan Wake 2 with Remedy's Creative Director
