History VideoGame / AlanWake

An UsefulNotes/XboxLiveArcade spin-off, ''Alan Wake's American Nightmare'', came out February 15, 2012. You can see the trailer [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjle1amsR50 here]]. Rather than the first game's Stephen King, psychological feel, it was inspired by Creator/QuentinTarantino, pulp and sci-fi horror, and urban legends. Following the events of the first game, Alan finds himself inside one of his own ''Night Springs'' episodes and has to do battle with the darkness once again.

* TheLittleShopThatWasntThereYesterday: Episode 1 reveals [[spoiler:There was no cabin on Cauldron Lake.]]

* RoomFullOfCrazy: At one point Alan enters a room completely scrawled with the strange graffiti repeating the name Tom over and over. If you look around the room even more, you'll find other phrases distinct from the normal glowie graffiti that suggests a more complex relationship between [[spoiler:Thomas, Barbara and Cynthia]].

* TheNicknamer: Agent Nightingale, who derisively calls Alan by a different author's name every time they meet.
** Once giving him two different nicknames in the same sentence.

* MissingTime: One moment, Alan's diving into Cauldron Lake to save Alice, the next, he's in his crashed car hanging over a cliff a week later. He later finds out [[spoiler:He spent that week writing ''Departure'' under the influence of the Dark Presence.]]

** Extremely frequent during the later part of the last chapter, [[spoiler:where the image of Barbara Jagger holding Alice jumps out on the screen, accompanied by a screeching noise, before every instance of her speaking to Alan.]] It get's old really quickly.

* EarlyInstallmentWeirdness: Alan's character model doesn't really resemble Ilkka Villi that much in the original release, it wouldn't be until VideoGame/Control where he'd really look like the same person. Notably, his face is changed most significantly in the remaster to remedy this.

** It's not just that, either. [[spoiler:Rusty, the man with whom she had secret feelings for (and vise versa), was murdered by the Dark Presence.]] And as if that and being MindRaped weren't enough, [[spoiler:she's apparently being haunted by a possessed Agent Nightingale, who had previously had a JerkWithAHeartOfGold moment when he comforted her during an interrogation]].

* AdaptationalEarlyAppearance: In ''Remastered'', a letter from the [[VideoGame/{{Control}} Federal Bureau of Control]] can be found on Sheriff Breaker's desk.

* SameLanguageDub: As with the protagonist of Remedy's ''VideoGame/MaxPayne'' games, Alan's model and voice are [[http://remedygames.com/matthew-porretta-visited-the-remedy-office/ two different people.]] Finnish actor Ilkka Villi acted as Wake's live-action actor, motion capture actor, and even provided the character's model, but the character was voiced by Creator/MatthewPorretta; the reason given was that, while Villi speaks fluent English, his heavy accent meant a professional voice actor was brought in due to Wake's American nationality. Only one of the FMV clips provide this trope though, as in the rest of them, Alan's narration is not synced up to his image on the screen.

* KickTheSonOfABitch: At one point in the game, Alan [[spoiler:locks Dr. Hartman in his own office and lets The Dark Presence take him away]].

* {{Expy}}:[[spoiler:Agent Nightingale heavily resembles Agent Gordon Cole of ''Series/TwinPeaks'', who is himself in turn played by none other than Creator/DavidLynch, who's in addition to that one acting role also one half of the show's writing team and its occasional director alongside Mark Frost. However, unlike Gordon, Nightingale is a terrible person and an alcoholic with no control over his impulses.]]

* AmuletOfDependency: Alan's flashlight fends off the Taken and Dark-touched objects. While his pistol and other weapons are important, they would be completely useless without using the flashlight to neutralize the Darkness first. The flares and flashbang grenades can also apply.

* DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything: Fighting off an unrelenting assault of once-human enemies that have been possessed (or "infected" if you will) on the deserted concert stage of an in-universe classic heavy metal band after switching it on to blast their biggest hit song and spew pyrotechnics everywhere. [[VideoGame/Left4Dead Does that get the old]] Creator/{{Valve|Software}}s [[VideoGame/Left4Dead turning in your head]]?
** Oh yeah. It also sounds [[VideoGame/BrutalLegend metal as hell.]]

* GroundhogDayLoop: The "game" Mr. Scratch plays with Alan. [[spoiler:He ends up reliving the same sequence at least three times, and the confrontation between Alan and Mr. Scratch we see at the start of the game is probably the end point of an earlier loop.]]\\
\\
Subverted in that [[spoiler:the memory of anyone caught in it gets better and better as the loops occur, which is why in the beginning no one knows each other or anything about what's going on, but by Act 3 Alan and his allies start performing beneficial tasks long before they originally happened. Examples include Emma setting up the oil derrick and Dr. Meadows repairing the telescope before Alan even arrives.]]

* CoolGuns: Quite a few of them. Possibly the coolest is the last unlockable gun, the combat shotgun, which is easily identifiable as an AA-12.

* AlternateRealityGame: Remedy launched a well-hidden (to the point that ''very'' little documentation of it exists outside of the ''Alan Wake'' wiki) ARG alongside this game, titled ''This House of Dreams.'' Players could find it by searching the internet for the [[SdrawkcabSpeech blackmasked]] message in "Balance Slays the Demon", leading them to a CharacterBlog by a woman who finds a collection of Thomas Zane poems in an old house she's renovating, and is subsequently plagued by dreams about Alan, Zane, and the Dark Place, as well as various paranormal encounters. It ended fairly abruptly after five months, but is referenced in an EasterEgg in ''VideoGame/{{Control}}'', Remedy's subsequent game set in the same universe as ''Alan Wake.''

Influenced heavily by other major horror/mystery works, you could say that the game is "Creator/StephenKing [[JustForFun/XMeetsY meets]] ''Series/TwinPeaks''", with a large dash of Creator/HPLovecraft added to the mix. Others have described it as the ''[[NothingIsScarier House]] [[Literature/HouseOfLeaves of Leaves]]'' of video games, and they are not that far off from the truth.

The game was going to be a PC exclusive that would melt quad-cores with its amazing graphics and physics. That was then scrapped when Remedy teamed up with Microsoft to make the game an Xbox 360 exclusive. They were later greenlit by Microsoft and produced a PC version for release nearly two years later in February 2012. It received similar critical reception as the Xbox version and paid back the porting costs within two days from release.

A television adaptation of the first game, picked up by Creator/AMC, was [[https://variety.com/2018/gaming/news/alan-wake-tv-show-1202938003/ first announced in 2018]], with Peter Calloway (''Series/CloakAndDagger2018'', ''Series/Legion2017'') initially signing on as showrunner and writer before leaving in 2022 due to scheduling conflicts. [[https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/alan-wake-amc-showrunner-exit-1235306033/ Jon Jashni and Jeff Ludwig]] serve as producers alongside Sam Lake.

Remedy released a remaster in 2021 on X-Box, [=PlayStation=], PC and (eventually) Switch.

A proper sequel, ''VideoGame/AlanWakeII'', was released in October 2023. It makes a GenreShift from the previous installments into full-on SurvivalHorror.

A psychological action thriller for the UsefulNotes/Xbox360 from Creator/RemedyEntertainment, this game tells the story of Alan Wake, an author of popular and best-selling thrillers who suffers from a long case of WritersBlock. On a vacation to the peaceful town of [[TownWithADarkSecret Bright Falls]] with his wife, Alice, things start to get strange when his wife is kidnapped. Alan forgets an entire week and begins finding pages of a new book that he apparently wrote himself, but which describes the events that he is currently living.