It also enabled us to do things like the “Previously on Alan Wake” bits, which were a great way to recap the story and set the stage for the next episode. Those are probably particularly useful reminders for players who play a couple of episodes, put the game down and then come back to it a little later, but we’ve found that even players who play the episodes back-to-back enjoy them.

8. Alan Wake manages to remain atmospheric and scary despite a higher emphasis on action that is typically seen in survival horror games. How did you manage to maintain this tension?

Mikko Rautalahti: As I mentioned earlier, we have a great deal of things we can do in terms of the user experience – we can very effectively change the way the environment looks and feels, and of course that also influences the atmosphere. But that’s just the most obvious thing we do, we have other tricks up our sleeve as well.

 

For instance, we tend to keep Alan Wake himself very much in the foreground – he has a personality and a presence, he’s not just an avatar for the player. Whenever the player controls Wake, he’s attempting to accomplish something that has a personal stake for him. That has an impact on how the player feels when Wake is in danger. We also have quite a bit of dialogue from other people, especially from the radio. Most of the time, what you hear from the radio is actually quite pleasant, nice people talking about nice things, but that tends to create a juxtaposition where you know more than those people do – they think everything is fine, but you know it isn’t. That’s kinda creepy in itself, I think.

 

And of course, there’s the overall sense of weirdness in the game – you meet a lot of strange people, and most people spend quite a bit of time thinking about whether what they just experienced is real or if it’s just some kind of a fantasy or nightmare. All of this creates an environment that can be scary.

 

A lot of people do see Alan Wake as a horror game, and that’s understandable, since we have our share of scary moments. But we didn’t really set out to make a scary game as such, which is why we like to talk about our game as a thriller. We don’t have a lot of big, intentional scares in our game – there are a few instances where something just jumps at you without a warning, but they’re really exceptions. I think startling people is generally pretty easy. I’m very easy to startle, at least! Creating an unsettling or disturbing atmosphere is a different thing.

9. A complaint for many about the game was its collectables. What was the reason for such a wide variety and number of these through out the game?

Mikko Rautalahti: Well, the manuscript pages are an integral part of our storyline, of course; there’s a very good reason why they are there, and they’re in many ways in the very core of the mystery we present you with. You don’t have to pick them up or read them, but if you do, you're going to get a lot more out of the story.

 

The coffee thermoses are a little different; they’re a pure collectible item for people who like finding and collecting things. I’m not going to pretend that they’re supremely interesting beyond that, but for a lot of people, it’s all about the hunt. I would imagine that most people who play a lot of videogames are familiar with the concept, and if that's not your thing, they're easy enough to ignore.

10. Both the original sound track and the licensed music were fit perfectly with the game (though at times I admit I felt it could be a little overbearing in the quiet forest). Can you tell me about you selections of licensed tracks and the original music’s inspiration?

 

Mikko Rautalahti:Our original music is by the incredibly talented Petri Alanko, but I’m not sure I can really start talking about his inspirations. I can tell you, however, that he’s a lot of fun to work with, because he’s extremely passionate about this kind of work and he takes the storytelling very seriously. I know he’s particularly interested in getting weird sounds out of everyday objects and elements. There’s a lot of things like squeaky office chairs or bottles rolling around on a concrete floor in his music – not that you can recognize them after he’s done with them, but it’s always fun to see what he comes up with next. That kind of mindset is very compatible with Alan Wake, I find.

 

As for the licensed tracks, we didn’t want to just throw in the latest hits or something; it really had to be music that fit our themes and episode-specific mood, so we had a huge list of candidates for various scenes. We have a great relationship with Poets of the Fall, so working with them was pretty easy, but the rest of it took more work – quite a bit of it, in fact. Licensing music is a process that often takes a lot of time and patience.

 

For example, for one song we wanted to use we would have had to get permission from four different parties, if I recall correctly, and it’s not like you can just call them up and say, “hey, can we use this?” There’s always a process, it’s a lot of red tape, and sometimes the people who own the rights just say “no” for reasons of their own. So it can be a lot of work, but I think the end results speak for themselves.

11. What are the plans for Alan Wake after the The Signal and The Writer?

Mikko Rautalahti: We do have lots of plans, and we’re pretty pumped up about them, but unfortunately there’s nothing I can really talk about yet.