Trivia / Alan Wake

• Acclaimed Flop: The game reviewed very well and achieved a solid fanbase of its own, but it had the misfortune of coming out on the same weekend as Red Dead Redemption and didn't see good initial sales (for comparison, that game sold 1.5 million copies within its first two weeks — Alan Wake sold only 140 thousand in the same amount of time). This was enough for Microsoft to quash Remedy's immediate plans for a sequel, though the game would eventually see financial vindication through its 2012 PC port and its cult fandom ensuring long-term word-of-mouth, having reached up to 4.5 million units sold by 2015.
• Creator's Favorite: Remedy has stated that they like Agent Nightingale's character, and would like to explore his mysterious backstory further. In the sequel, he's killed and Taken at the very beginning of the game.
• Dummied Out: In the Remastered version of the game, all of the product placement from Verizon and Energizer has been replaced with in-universe branding.
• Orphaned Reference:
  • In the remaster, the product placement for Energizer is removed. Despite this the achievement for swapping batteries 100 times is still called "Energized!"
  • Also in the remaster, the product placement for Verizon is removed, making the "can you hear me now" line in 'The Signal' a bit odd with the amount of emphasis given to it.
• Saved from Development Hell: The game was in production for over six years. Some wondered if it was going to be entirely Vaporware until its release.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: The expiring music rights to the game meant that it was delisted from Steam and Xbox Live Arcade Marketplace on May 2017. It was finally rescued in October 2018 when Microsoft resolved the licensing issues and the game was returned to sale on Steam and Xbox Live.
• Throw It In!: The poltergeist objects the darkness throws at you weren't part of the original script. It's just that the game engine would occasionally make objects twitch and jump, so the team decided to take advantage of that and make it part of gameplay.
• Troubled Production: The game had a really rough time getting completed. The original plan was to make an open-world Survival Horror game (a conscious decision to break away from the linearity of Max Payne), but this proved to be far too ambitious for the relatively inexperienced and understaffed Remedy Entertainment as everyone was struggling to keep up with the game's open-ended design (the gameplay loop was found to be uninteresting and the game's structure clashed with the narrative ideas they were aiming for), in turn struggling to meet development milestones. Three years into development, they realized they were facing an impossibly uphill battle and put themselves under a two-month suspension while a "sauna" group of lead developers determined where they were going to have to cut their losses and rework the project into something manageable. From there, the project was soft-rebooted into a linear, level-based action thriller with a large Psychological Horror bend, which finally allowed the studio the room to breathe and complete the game normally.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The very first trailer was released a long time before the game was released. Small details and even the premise changed during development. Later trailers would then reiterate the plot but still got some other details wrong. What you can't see from the trailers is that it was originally going to be an open-world game.
  • There were plans for more Taken animals to be used, such as Taken dogs and bears, but the developers didn't like the animations they got for them and so cut them. There's even a little misleading foreshadowing, such as a dog that goes missing (and another dog you hear about going missing over the radio). It's also very likely that at one point they intended the wooly mammoth skeleton to come to life, since in the same building you see a giant hole in the wall and Alan remarks that it's "mammoth-sized." These are all probable leftovers in the script from when they planned more animals to attack you.
  • Nathan Fillion was reportedly interested in taking up the role of Alan Wake.
  • A result of the game becoming an Xbox 360 exclusive in the middle of development. The game was demoed for its graphics, physics and multi-core technology before that. There's room to speculate whether some of the physics effects seen in the early demos were cut because of consolidation or because the developers got other ideas.
  • The game was originally planned as an open world game with a day/night cycle, but they couldn't get that to work with the story Sam Lake wanted to tell, so it became episodic and more linear. However, the entire game world is still available the whole time, and this contributes to the town of Bright Falls feeling more like a real place.

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