Remedy Entertainment has put everything it’s got into the creation of Alan Wake and if it tanks, Oskari Hakkinen says they’re all going to end up “selling hotdogs in Helsinki.”
“Go big or go home” is something my friends like to say, usually right before disaster strikes. It’s also the approach Remedy took when making Alan Wake, the “psychological thriller” that comes out later this month. The studio spent more than a half-decade going whole hog on the game and if it doesn’t perform well on the shelves, it’ll be bad news for everyone.
“We are betting the farm on [Alan Wake] and if this isn’t a success we’ll be selling hotdogs in Helsinki,” Hakkinen, Remedy’s head of franchise development, told CVG. “Really.”
“We were in a good situation after Max Payne 2 and we invested everything after selling the intellectual property and putting it back into the love of making videogames,” he continued. “Everything’s gone into this project so this will ultimately set us up for how we continue and how many videogames we can make in the future.”
Hakkinen is no doubt hoping than Alan Wake doesn’t end up like Max Payne 2, which was critically well-received but sold so poorly that Take-Two blamed it for being forced to reduce its financial guidance for the 2004 fiscal year. On the upside, Alan Wake has been a huge hit with critics; our own Susan Arendt described it with words like “brilliant,” “excellent” and “gorgeous” in her review and awarded it a 5/5 score. At the end of the day, that’s all any game studio can really ask for.
Alan Wake comes out on May 14 in Europe and May 18 in North America, exclusively for the Xbox 360.
