The New York Game Awards announced today that Remedy Entertainment Creative Director Sam Lake is the latest recipient of the Andrew Yoon Legend Award, joining the ranks of Hideo Kojima, Jerry Lawson, and other industry luminaries.
As part of the announcement, IGN sat down with Lake to talk about wrapping up Alan Wake II while looking ahead to Control 2, Remedy's live action shows, and getting him together with David Lynch for a coffee. He also confirmed the recent Lake House DLC's ties to Control 2 and talked about how one particular scene came about. You can read the complete interview below.
The New York Game Awards take place Tuesday, January 21 at the SVA Theatre in Manhattan. You can read our review of Alan Wake II right here.
I'm talking to Sam on the occasion of the New York Game Awards, where he has been nominated to win the New York Game Awards' Andrew Yoon Legend Award. Sam, how does it feel to win?
Sam Lake: Pretty incredible. I mean, a huge honor. I feel really, really happy and blessed about it.
You've been making video games for so long now. What continues to inspire you after 30 years in the industry?
Sam Lake, Creative Director, Remedy Entertainment: Yeah, it's been close to 30 years now. Video games as a form of expression and art… I feel the exciting thing is there is no set form and no kind of strict set of rules. We are still a very young medium that keeps on finding new ways and keeps on evolving. And we are so tightly connected to the technology, which keeps on going forward at great speed. It kind of feels like every new project is a new opportunity to innovate and come up with something that nobody has done before. And we always start by prototyping ideas that would not have been possible with the previous game. That keeps it very fresh and exciting. Yeah. I mean, we are in a place where we can invent new things all the time, and there hasn't been a day when it's felt boring, and I don't think that that day will ever come.
It's been a busy year for Remedy. Can you talk a little bit about what's been happening behind the scenes?
Sam Lake: Yeah. I mean, Alan Wake II, like I guess all the game projects, are big, big efforts, and there is a lot of work that goes into it. Obviously, the main game came out a bit over a year ago now, but then there was DLC work — Night Springs coming at the beginning of the summer, and now very recently, The Lake House. So now, finally, we are at the stage where we can say that Alan Wake II as a project is complete and done. So that was a big part of it. But these days, Remedy has grown in size and we are a multi-project organization, so there are other game projects happening, obviously. Multiple teams working on multiple projects. Firebreak, our first co-op game; Control 2 in the works, and then Max Payne 1 and 2 being remade as remakes.
Spoiler warning for Alan Wake II's Lake House DLC
You mentioned The Lake House DLC and Alan Wake II, and there was a particular scene in there that a lot of people took as kind of a teaser trailer for Control 2, which is currently underway. Was it intended to be a teaser trailer, and can you tell me a little bit about making that scene?
Sam Lake: We now have established firmly the concept of Remedy Connected Universe, meaning that Control and Alan Wake exist in the same world. And obviously, this happened when we were working on Control. Playing through Control, players were finding things that tied it to Alan Wake. And then we had two DLCs with Control, and the last DLC, called AWE, was very much a crossover between Control and Alan Wake, setting up Alan Wake II. And that worked really well. We were happy with that. The plan was, right from the get-go, that we'd mirror it with Alan Wake II and the second DLC.
The Lake House, obviously, is themed around Federal Bureau of Control. The whole location you are investigating and everything in it is firmly a crossover between Control and Alan Wake. And yes, there were glimpses to Control's world in other ways as well. Control II is being worked on with the Control team and creating the content for that was very much a collaboration. Well, everything at Remedy is very much a collaboration between the teams, but this more than many other things.
Spoiler end
You talk a lot about the shared universe between Control and Alan Wake. Do you have an endgame-like finale kind of in your head?
Sam Lake: I feel we are just getting started, so it's too early to start talking about an endgame. I love tying these things together. I love making it deeper and expanding on the lore. It really feels like this kind of opportunity to take these strands that we have put there, expand, entertain different ideas. It feels really exciting. And the way we are looking at it, every game needs to be enjoyable on its own and stand on its own feet.
But for our fans, for people who have been playing other Remedy games, we want to put in a lot of content for them to discover. We also feel hopeful that now that there is a universe and a catalog of games that will be expanding as we go; for somebody playing their first Remedy game, they can continue in the universe and check out the other games as well and dive deeper into that rabbit hole.
Do you have an update on the film and television versions of Control and Alan Wake?
Sam Lake: We now have a deal with Annapurna Pictures. We are very excited about it, but it's also very, very early days. What's exciting is we have been exploring this and we feel it's worth exploring for a long time. Now, with Annapurna, we have a perfect partner and it feels like a genuine collaboration. Obviously, they bring in their prestige expertise and we bring in our universe and our games, and together we are exploring ideas. But yes, early days, but I am very excited.
Are you going to bring in David Lynch as a collaborator on this since you take so much inspiration from him?
Sam Lake: Yeah. Wouldn't that be cool? Yeah, no. I mean, as I said, early, early days, and where we are with everything is that we are just exploring the potential in our universe for different projects and ideas. We'll see where it goes.
Just out of curiosity, have you ever actually had an opportunity to meet David Lynch over the course of your long career? And if you haven't, is there something that you would really love to talk to him about?
Sam Lake: I would love to meet him. I have never met him, unfortunately. I would love to have a conversation about just creating things, stories, and anything.
We need to get Sam Lake and David Lynch together and get them maybe in a coffee shop in Twin Peaks.
Sam Lake: Yeah, maybe over a cup of coffee. I would be already so happy about that, just sharing a… Drinking a cup of coffee with him. That would be wonderful.
Moving on really quickly to the Max Payne remakes. What's it been like to revisit that series and what's been kind of the most difficult element to translate to 2024?
Sam Lake: I feel that it's still too early to really start opening up what we've been doing there and how we are thinking about it. Obviously, very aware of many people love Max Payne and take it very seriously. There will be plenty of more opportunities later on to talk about it at length.
Looking across the games industry as a whole, you know better than most what a boom and bust industry games can be. Do you think 2025 will be the start of something better? Maybe the start of another boom?
Sam Lake: We all hope that, of course. I mean, these things tend to be this kind of a pendulum swing, so hopefully we are through the worst of the rough times and headed to better times, obviously. Obviously, a lot of really, really talented people have lost their jobs, and yeah, hopefully we are headed to better times.
Talking maybe a little more optimistically, you were talking about what continued to inspire you about games and how it's almost there are always horizons and the medium is always changing, and what innovations in games are sort of the most exciting to you right now?
Sam Lake: I'm really proud about what we achieved with Alan Wake II, and personally, to me, games as a storytelling medium, and from that perspective, an art form. It's been a long journey. I can look back and see logical steps through it all, but more and more I'm looking at it from the perspective of all of these different forms of expression, all of these different mediums and art forms, how games as a very modern medium can hold all of that in them, and how in this interactive form we can use everything that really has come before and give it kind of a new meaning and context. Create, really use all of that to create these layered worlds that the player can then go and experience and explore.
I feel that we made kind of a very decisive leap forward when it comes to that, but in no way do I feel that we would have reached the end. Already in the process of creating this latest game, there were a lot of new exciting ideas that came about, but were not possible to explore in the context of Alan Wake II. But, yeah. So yeah, I am excited about that, for sure.
I really loved how Alan Wake II incorporated not only live action segments, but musical numbers. And if there was one takeaway that I had from that game, it's that there needs to be more games with musical numbers, and I hope Alan Wake II can pave the way.
Sam Lake: Yeah, I hope so too. That, too, was this kind of a dream that was building up for a long time, for many, many years. I even tried to get a musical sequence into Control. Unfortunately, that was scoped out along the way. But now finally we got to do it. It's a complicated thing, and we iterated on this concept quite a lot through production. It did kind of morph and changed its form a few times until we found the version that's in the final game. But yeah, I mean, overall there is nothing better than if anything we do ends up inspiring in any way somebody else to create something of their own.
Kat Bailey is IGN's News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.
