a psychological action thriller

 
As ↑E³ approached the usual straylight had again started to sift through the closed hatches of the nordic creator gods’ realm—and hit my modding community of course, too. Everything seems to have started on 19 April 2005 with a casual ↑sidenote at cgonline, saying that a new game by “Max Payne creators ↑Remedy“ will be showcased at E³. Then ↑Remedy said that it will be something new, completely different. On 21 April 2005 Lon Matero posted at the ↑3DR forums that he had discovered something: Remedy has ↑registered Alan Wake as a trademark (The only other trademarks applied for by the company are ‘Remedy’ and ‘Max-FX Technology’). Speculations started that this will be the name of Remedy’s new game. ShackNews ↑shared this suspicion the very same day. Not very much later ↑alanwake.com was discovered—without carrying content yet. On 04 May 2005—in two different threads at the 3DR forums—↑Jokke_r and ↑smattbac at the very same time posted the news that the Alan Wake website now was filled with first glimpses of the game. From then on the information spread rapidly. And the Max Payne community reacted.

Still on the same day MP-veteran ADoomedMarine erected the first beacon around which the future Alan-Wake community may condensate. He opened an ↑Alan Wake Forum at ↑Max Payne Forums, and on 07 May 2005 he brought ↑alanwake.net online, immediately followed by ↑PayneReactor‘s sister page ↑WakeReactor. Like ↵Stalker Alan Wake now has a modding-community infrastructure long before the release of the game. All this brought a conversation up from my memory, which I had with an employee at TakeTwo a long, long time ago. She asked if I thought that the Max-Payne-modding community was interested in Max-Payne games only, or in everything Remedy creates. Now I suspect that back then she already knew that Max Payne 3 would not be done by Remedy, and that Remedy had something completely different in the pipeline—I know that you are reading this … you easily could trust me a little more ;-) Back to topic: I did not know what to answer, but suspected that the community-members are more attached to the Max Payne character and story than to Remedy. Now I think I was wrong, although the comments are mixed. At the one hand it is said that the real hope was to learn more about Max Payne 3. On the other end of the spectrum reigns a motto like ‘Max Payne is dead—long live Alan Wake.’ For me there definitely is the chance to be absolutely close to the emerging of a new modding community, evoloving out of the Max-Payne community. Wook, are you listening? Will there be ↵Lightsaber 5 for Alan Wake?

What we can see in the ↑teaser trailer gives rise to the hope that one indeed can make large maps for Alan Wake which suit the Lightsaber-theme. Apart from that the trailer refrains from showing us any action. The beautiful captions of scandinavian landscapes lets us experience the atmosphere of mystery and the unknown. Jokke_r and some others discovered a ↑secret picture of Alan Wake—which later was removed from Remedy’s website—onto which was written: “Alan Wake is a bestselling horror writer. He made a book about his darkest nightmares. Now those nightmares come true” Is the game about a StephenKingesque writer who discovers that he lives through his own stories? The community also discovered that the lines of text in the trailer (“Some are born to light. Some are born to endless night.”) resemble lines of the poem “Auguries of Innocence” by William Blake: “Some are born to sweet delight. Some are born to endless night.” Light and Darkness—Lightsabers!
Initially via Max Payne Area | tnx to Sentinel for his great summary