Remedy Entertainment has discussed the heavily-rumoured Alan Wake 2, suggesting, if it happens, it won't take as long as the first game to create and won't launch on a PlayStation console.Is there a team at Remedy working on Alan Wake 2, or at the very least thinking about it?
"Thinking about it?" head of franchise development Oskari Hakkinen told ********* when we asked him that very question.
"When we made Max Payne, we never knew it was going to be a success. We were just young people in a basement creating a video game that became massive. We were shocked by people tapping us on the back at E3 and saying, 'You've done something amazing. Do you realise what you've done?' Everyone's like, 'No. What have we done?' It's like, 'You've created this amazing game.'
"On Max Payne 1 Sam [Lake, creative director] killed off all the characters. So it was a problem starting Max Payne 2 because we never knew we were going to make a sequel. We never thought about it. Sam never wrote the story like that. He wrote one game. The only reason why Mona Sax survived when the lift door closed is because one of the partners we were working with on the graphic novel, she was like, 'Don't kill Mona!' So we changed it so you didn't explicitly see she died. Fortunately, that's why Mona played such a big role in Max Payne 2.
"For Alan Wake, we planned a little bit more ahead. So with the story Sam had already created the fiction from the get-go to be something larger than just one game. He created it with a whole franchise and a whole universe in mind. Even Night Springs was something he had already thought about - a fiction within a fiction. So it came quite naturally for him to know the fit for [Xbox Live Arcade game Alan Wake's American Nightmare].
"It's a lot more thought out than Max Payne ever was, but at the same time we've got nothing to announce."
While Alan Wake 2 remains unannounced, an Xbox World report from last year suggested the game was being made for the next Xbox, which is rumoured to be set for an E3 2012 announcement.
While Hakkinen refused to confirm or deny this report when we put it to him, he did say that if Remedy makes Alan Wake 2 it won't take as long to create as Alan Wake.
"Development wise, five years is developing an engine, the tech, the tools, all of the things you need to do to do a story, a character, other NPC characters and so forth," he explained.
"Once those things are done it's a lot easier. We're seeing it already with American Nightmare, which was only eight months of development, and we completely changed the setting. It's in Arizona now. It's not in the Pacific Northwest.
"So without recycling much of anything we did it in eight months, because a lot of the things were already locked down. It's a lot easier when you've got a team that knows what they're doing and it's about a franchise they know.
"The answer is, if we were to do a sequel to Alan Wake, it certainly is a much quicker and easier development cycle than the original Alan Wake, because the engine is created for the game. The overall fiction and the universe is already created.
"Concerning next-gen, I really can't speak to it because it's just a fuzzy thought in everybody's head right now. We don't know [what's coming]. They're keeping it very tight. Maybe it's just not the right time to talk about it."
Alan Wake launched as an Xbox 360 exclusive in 2010. It launches on PC this week nearly two years later. Alan Wake's American Nightmare is an Xbox Live Arcade exclusive game.
So far, Alan Wake has yet to grace a PlayStation platform, and it sounds like it will continue to skip Sony consoles in the future - despite Remedy owning the Alan Wake IP.
"I know you're never going to see Alan Wake or Alan Wake's American Nightmare on PlayStation," Hakkinen said. "Those are Xbox exclusives.
"The franchise is really close to our hearts. It's something we developed for a long time. You'll be seeing more of Alan Wake in the future."
But will Alan Wake 2 be multi-platform?
"With all honesty, there are absolutely no plans for that at the moment," Hakkinen replied. "I'm not going to say never, but at the same time I'll say there are no plans. There are no conversations and no plans going on for multi-platform."
