The first Alan Wake has many references to the works of Stephen King, including the opening line of Wake’s own voice that describes what nightmares really are. What is surprising is King’s gesture towards the developers of Remedy, since we learned that the rights to use this phrase only cost the studio a dollar.
Sam Lake, director of Remedy, confessed in an interview with Eurogamer that he really wanted to start the game with a phrase from the American author whose style goes hand in hand with the supernatural terror that the game references at all times. .
A stellar collaboration at an absurd price
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Lake refers to the segment that launches the first game:
“Stephen King once wrote that ‘nightmares exist outside of logic, and there is little pleasure in having explanations; they are antithetical to the poetry of fear.
“In a horror story, the victim keeps asking ‘why?’ But there can be no explanation, and there should not be. The unanswered mystery is what stays with us the longest, and it’s what we’ll remember in the end. My name is Alan Wake, I’m a writer.
The sentence in question comes from a article King wrote in 2008 for Entertainment Weekly and it’s called, “The Reasons Why Hollywood Can’t Do Terror,” and it lists the causes of major studios’ failures to want to convey fear and at the same time try to capture a mass audience with it.
Besides the aforementioned references to King, Alan Wake’s debut title has other influences from great works of horror, not only from the literary sphere with HP Lovecraft but also from the television genre like The Twilight Zone and Twin Peaks. Will they return in Alan Wake 2?
