Sam Lake Picks His Favorite Moment from Every Remedy Game

Remedy Entertainment makes games packed full of memorable moments. Whether it’s Max Payne’s nightmare fuel dream state levels or Control’s reality-twisting Ashtray Maze, you’ll no doubt have your favourites. So, we thought we’d ask Sam Lake, Creative Director at Remedy, to choose his fondest moments from each of the games he’s worked on in over 20 years at the studio. Here’s what he picked:

Max Payne (2001)

My favourite moment in Max Payne goes back to my love of Meta and having that as an element in pretty much all of our games. This is where we did it the first time. There is a moment where Max Payne is pumped full of Valkyr, the drug, and he’s hallucinating and we are breaking the fourth wall and he realises that he’s in a video game. Well back then, a computer game. Somehow that just felt so funny and exciting as a concept. Still to this day, the fans of the game keep bringing that up as something that kind of blew their minds.

Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne

I feel that for Max Payne 2, having gone to study screenwriting in between the games and having more understanding of storytelling, I do really like the kind of the film noir approach or fragmented timeline, and the now that we keep coming back to. In graphic novel terms, it’s just Max and Mona facing each other and kissing and him being kind of quite dark in his metaphors about it. Then finally, at the end, it’s revealed that we have been kind of fooling you and Mona is actually lying down on the ground and she is dead. I really like this kind of looping narrative and the simple visualisation of a graphic novel and what it gives you and allows you to do.

The bonus would be the TV shows, because that’s also been something that we’ve been carrying with us and evolving and making bigger as an aspect. Just the idea of these different genres just for fun, having these TV shows in the in-game televisions and all of them kind of in a weird way reflect his story. I do like Lords and Ladies, it was a lot of fun, but maybe my favourite would be Address Unknown. Because it’s a psycho thriller and I feel that certain aspects of it, like as something that fascinates me as a writer are presenting, let’s say, in Alan Wake and they came forward and Alan Wake being closer to that genre than what Max Payne is.

Alan Wake

This idea that we started with Max Payne already of using different mediums for storytelling and then we started collaborating with Poets of the Fall. They did the end credit song for Max Payne 2, and this idea of what if we would have a fictional band in our world and we would have music for that band and that would be part of the story and relevance to the plot. Bringing in Old Gods of Asgard, I feel really excited about it still and we’ve been working in our follow-up games with that idea and that kind of culminating into that crazy, crazy stage fight scene where we have a heavy metal song blaring and enemies coming at you and also our main characters in that Alan Wake and Barry being kind of energised and amused by it. I think that certain different levels of storytelling and action gameplay just kind of click together and come together in that.

Quantum Break

The idea of broken time and where, to me, that comes together in a really interesting way from a storytelling perspective is Will’s workshop, the kind of the ground zero. When you find this location that Monarch is also gravitating towards and get in, and time is broken, and we are seeing these visions and fragments through broken time of Will working on the device to fix everything. That to me just kind of like once again, combines gameplay and storytelling. The very core idea of what the story is about, and what is the mystery you are trying to understand come together in that one scene.

Control

For Control, there are a lot of options to pick from. Let’s just for now say the idea of how coming out of Quantum Break, doing that massive crazy thing with live action, this whole branching TV show and scaling it down, but finding ways to integrate it much more into the gameplay, which goes to our hotline visions of Trench, but also then Dr. Darling and Dr. Darling videos. Having worked with Matthew Porretta for years and years as the voice of Alan Wake, getting to know Matt and kind of knowing what he can do, and creating this character of Dr. Darling for him to have fun with. Then using that as a device to open up and explain a lot of the crazy science lore of Control and having these videos and shooting them together with Matt. That is one of the highlights for sure.

Alan Wake 2

I do have favourite moments in Alan Wake 2 for sure and hope we’ll get a chance to come back to this question and talk about it once it’s out and it’s no longer a spoiler. It would be easy to pick one of those. I won’t, but maybe taking a step back and kind of continuing the thread of this is that what we did with live-action material in Control, we wanted to be much more ambitious, push it much further in Alan Wake 2, and integrate it even closer to the experience.

Especially with The Dark Place, you will see and experience these live-action scenes in different genres, but they are very much integrated into the idea of The Dark Place being this layered deep dream reality. Alan Wake on his journeys, is almost slipping from one layer of reality to another and we are using live action as that. You’ll end up going into a live-action scene and watching it with Alan Wake there, suddenly being confused about how he landed here. You’ll see that scene, it plays out, and then we have another dreamlike transition and you are on the other side. It was a pleasure creating those and knitting them together into the experience. Out of those, I do have my favourites, but I’ll let everybody discover them on their own.

What are your favourite Remedy moments? Let us know in the comments below.