Sam Lake clearly likes messed up characters. Well, that's not quite it – he likes intelligently messed up characters. Seven years ago, the writer at Finnish studio Remedy Entertainment brought a deeper, more intriguing incarnation of the loose cannon cop to third-person shooter, Max Payne. The character's life was a Shakespearean vortex of remorse and violence, his internal monologues littered with extended metaphors, his world awash with mythological references.

For the last five years, Lake has been applying his dark imagination to the long-awaited Xbox 360 thriller, Alan Wake. Here, the eponymous hero is a bestselling author, struck by writer's block and desperate to re-ignite his creativity. So he and his wife head out to a remote town in Washington for some rest and relaxation, only to find that a dark presence has infected the community; and it seems Wake may have more to do with it than he knows.

To create this story of paranoia and supernatural fear, Lake has taken inspiration from Stephen King, Twin Peaks and Lost, crafting a new take on the survival horror genre in the process. But how much can linear narrative influences help in the construction of an interactive experience? And if Alan Wake really is planned like a TV series, with the first title representing season one, where can we expect things to go next?

Last week, we spoke to Sam about his approach to writing and his plans for Wake. Here's part one of that interview...



Before joining Remedy you studied screenwriting at the Theater Academy of Finland. How much of that experience have you been able to apply to game design?

Well, there are similarities, but there are also things you need to do in a completely different way. The storytelling process in general, and using visual and audio elements in storytelling, is very similar. Also, the way you write dialogue is the same whether you're writing for movies or TV or games. We use movie scriptwriting software to write the screenplays for our games, but naturally we have things in the script that you would never have in a movie script – different branches and optional dialogue, for example. But still, when it comes to storytelling and dialogue, they are very much the same.

I'm not sure all writers feel such close synchronicity between TV, movie and game writing. Do you think your approach allowed you to do things with Max Payne that game narratives hadn't done before?

Well, for me, with the Max Payne games, it was very important to have different levels in the story, both the external action and the internal struggles of the main character. I was looking at it from the perspective of Payne's character and kind of saw the whole gloomy version of New York as a projection of what was going on in his mind. It was very important to let the player step inside Max's head and see what was going on. With action games, I don't think that had really been done before.

And that's kind of what's happening in Alan Wake isn't it? he's undergoing a crisis and the town he visits – Bright Falls – somehow comes to reflect that...

Yes, definitely. It's the way I like to approach a story in general. In Alan Wake, the themes revolve around primitive fears – the fear of the dark, the fear of water, the fear of the unknown. Alan Wake journeys from a big city to this remote town and experiences all of these fears; and a dark forest felt like a very fitting setting to wrestle with those deeply rooted subconscious fears that are familiar to all of us. I feel that every single one of us has experienced the fear of the dark when we were children.



So what brought you to this game, this character and these themes?

I was involved from the very beginning of Alan Wake and different elements of the game came at different times early on. Here at Remedy we like to begin with the high concept, the vision, and we feel that the story and the main character are very much part of that initial phase. We build the whole thing around them. The theme of primal fear was part of the very first high level concept that we were talking about – and there were many elements in there already that I felt would be very important.

With Alan Wake's character, I felt that he needs to be an everyman. I didn't want to have a professional action hero in this game, I wanted a character who needs to grow into that role to survive. I wanted to make a deeper and more realistic character than you have in action games generally, so Alan Wake is an ordinary man who struggles with ordinary problems, like difficulties in his relationship, problems with his work... He's not perfect, he does have flaws, he has a problem with his temper, he has difficulties dealing with the success he has garnered, he has partied too much. In some ways he is bored of writing the same things over and over again – he wants a change in his life, but can't find out how. For that reason, he's suffering from writer's block. All of these things piece by piece came together to create the character.

And the setting?

It was there from the very early stages. This kind of idyllic and slightly quirky All American small town is a very well-known concept from pop culture in general. But in games, we have not really seen a small town as it is portrayed in movies and TV series', so it felt like a good setting.

But parallels could be drawn with Silent Hill 2 - an everyman returns to a favourite rural haunt only to find it infected by a supernatural presence that symbolises his distubed state of mind... Were you concerned about comparisons?

I suppose it is inevitable that players draw comparisons between the set ups of the two games, but I'm confident that when players experience Alan Wake, they'll see that what's going on in there is something totally different than what's happening in Silent Hill.

Having a writer as the lead character is interesting because it allows you to create a very literate internal monologue, but it also explores the whole notion of the video game player as a creative force. Were these the intentions?

One of the reasons that Alan Wake ended up being a writer was that, with the Max Payne games, I had used the internal monologue if you will, the voice of narration, which is very common in hardboiled crime fiction, as a story telling tool and it was a very good tool. Narration in general is a very good tool, it works very well in a game, and I wanted to do that again with Alan Wake, but from a different angle. That's where the professional story teller element came in – it should be his story that's coming true, he's the story teller in it.

That was the first step to making him a writer. I also wanted to use the writing process in a way, the creative process of working on a large project like this. On one level of the story, it's almost a metaphor for what's happening to him, that he's struggling to create his work, and the difficulties he's facing. And naturally as a writer, to me it is familiar and something that I know a lot about. It felt like a very good way to bring additional depth into Alan Wake's story...

Part two tomorrow.