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interview at the diner

xirdalium Posted on by

Diner at Bright Falls
 
Maniac and Aavenr from the much respected Max-Payne-site ↑Deep Six met with Remedy’s Sam Lake (Lead Writer and the man who lent his face to the original Max Payne—although at first glance I thought it was Mickey Rourke, no offence ;-) and Petri Järvilehto (Lead Game Designer) at a Diner like seen above (I mean an online one) and conducted an enlightening ↑interview [via ↑AlanWAKE.Net] on Alan Wake. Now we know about the story from first hand:

SL: Alan Wake is a successful horror writer. For the material of his first novel, he used the strange dreams that he had started seeing after he met his fiancée. In a very concrete way, she was his muse. When the book was published, it became an instant bestseller. It was a dream come true for Wake. But then his fiancée went missing under mysterious circumstances. Wake was devastated. He couldn’t write anymore. His dreams stopped and he began to suffer from insomnia.

At the beginning of the game, Wake travels to a sleep clinic to get help for his condition. The clinic is located outside the small town of Bright Falls in the idyllic state of Washington. There, Wake is able to sleep again, and there Wake runs into a woman who is the very image of his missing love. At once, he begins to see dreams again, this time they are terrible nightmares. Almost out of habit, and to save his career, he begins to write a new book based on those nightmares, but something goes horribly wrong. Bright Falls starts to turn more and more nightmarish, and starts to resemble the details in the book Wake is working on. He ends up fighting for his life, trying to understand what is happening. […]

In the Max Payne games we used the structure of a movie for the story, and movies, as we all know, are rather short. With Alan Wake we are using a season of a TV-series for our story template, and that should give you a fair idea of a longer game.

Regarding the question if a modding-community will be supported, we learn:

PJ: We’d love to. We really liked seeing what the mod people came up with for the Max Payne games. Having said that, here’s a big disclaimer… we’re using so much different middleware and other components, that I’m not entirely sure whether we can get all of the legal bases covered for the release of the tools. We’ll keep you posted on this though.

Besides this there was quite some activity in the AWnet forums: Two new photographed ↑screenshots from a finnish gaming-magazine were posted, and Uisor courteously ↑translated the accompanying finnish text.
More of the old-timers ↑trickle in. Then there was speculation about the character-model of Alan Wake being based on ex-Remedy-man ↑marvel—the link refers to an old interview ↑biXen did with marvel at the end of the 20th century. It is mainly on marvel’s involvement with the ↑demoscene. The latter being a topic in itself, very much related to gamemodding—other MP-modders like ↑Maddieman have roots in said scene. biXen’s old site ↑apollo-X from 1998/99 is a good primer on that, and a good example for the scene’s sense for self-reflection and its own history.

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