Pelaaja Interview with Sam Lake translated.

Jokke_r, a long time Max Payne and Alan Wake fan has gracefully translated the recent interview with Sam Lake.

Click the ‘read more’ link below to check out the interview.

Sami Järvi (Sam Lake) and Pelaaja magazine interview:

Translated by: Jokke_r
Original Interview by: Pelaaja

Pelaaja: Welcome to pelaaja’s special podcast err which hasn’t really been planned overall but lets see what happens, besides me we have Miika Huttunen, we have a very interesting guest, really cool for you to have made it over here. Remedy is in the house! So, is it Sami Järvi or is it ”Sam Lake”?

Sam Lake: Well, lets just say Järvi in this situation when we’re speaking Finnish :)

Pelaaja: Alright, well welcome.

Sam Lake: Thanks

Sam Lake: For starters we could probably take this question which probably all gamers have been waiting for who want to see Alan Wake, Remedy’s next huge Finnish game [Interrupted]

Pelaaja: Well lets lay down some groundwork here first, it was revealed in the beginning of the week that there’s going to be a new trailer and thats the first time in like two years that when we’re talking about Alan Wake..

Sam Lake: Yeah probably what all gamers want to know: Whats taken so long?

[Laughs]

Sam Lake: Well ”quality” is whats taking so long. Well of course something like this takes its time, we’re still even if we’ve hired more people, a relatively small team when compared to other studios making similar games. And when you’re doing the game you put the quality standards pretty high and you want to make a good game, of course there is also large ambitions from the whole team in every area and that always takes time.. before the game is done.

Pelaaja: Of course you also have this great situation that you have the possibility to develop the game for as long as you have.

Sam Lake: Yep

Pelaaja: Which still seems pretty rare nowadays.

Sam Lake: Yes, feels like it’s getting more rare all the time.

Pelaaja: Like if you look over at Sony, insomnia, resistance and ratchet & clank, like they’re property of sony and generally when the publisher takes that risk is a remarkable thing that you have that.

Sam Lake: True

Pelaaja: But.. then you gotta ask that when it takes this long and you look back and wasn’t it E3 2005 when we saw Wake for the first time?

Sam Lake: Yup i think that was the first time

pelaaja: that.. how much of what we saw then was just ”smoke and mirrors”? I mean at that time it looked like you had gotten pretty far already.

Sam lake: Well yes… i mean, we had done a lot of work on the ”high concept” with the games ”vision” and on the tech side of things, gameworld and game engine had been worked on a lot. Then again the actual gameplay was very much at a prototype stage at that time. We we’re pretty much just showing the Alan Wake ”idea” and ”vision” that was pretty much the goal there.

Pelaaja: Yeah and you we’re looking for a publisher, so you got to put out a good show and show what you got. But has the game then during these last two years changed direction in a way or another? Has some aspects of the gameplay mechanic, i know you can’t go into detail but has something changed?

Sam Lake: Well, I mean lets say that thinking on a high level and the ”vision” side of things it’s pretty much on the same tone where we started off at, the actual game mechanics, well looking back at the whole Max Payne ordeal these things are alive and looking for their final forms over the course of the whole development process and every time we get something running and vigorously test it and analyze it and examine it together with all the other elements it’s only natural that it shapes itself in some direction. Pretty far into the project, perhaps not all the way but pretty far into the project we’re still looking for what really makes the absolute best Alan Wake game, I got to say about Max Payne that it was only months before going gold that bullet time took its final form for example. There was all sorts of experimentation around that feature, we knew what we wanted but the final form, how it actually worked in the game was found pretty late in the project.

Pelaaja: OK, well if we look at like PS3, 360 game development in general, there’s many teams that have released like two games already, so is it still like when talking about how development times stretch out that even if you want the final result to be as good as possible and as close to the original vision as possible but when you make the game for four to five years that at some point you just feel that god dammit can’t this thing be done already [laughs]

Sam Lake: Yeah well, I don’t think there’s one person on the Remedy team that didn’t want to get this game done as fast as possible without sacrificing quality but but.. still. It ’s hard making big projects like this, there’s always surprises and problems around the corner and if everything worked 100% and just clicked on the first try it probably wouldn’t take as long to get the game together and there’s always harder competition in the business…

Pelaaja: Like you said about surprises and problems coming up, i think that when having talked to some pretty experienced developers they all agree that ”open world” game development is really hard, it probably brings a lot of challenges.

Sam Lake: Yeah i have to say that, we were thinking at some point after Max Payne 1 that now that this job is done that we know this thing, it’ll get easier, but it didn’t really get much easier. There’s lots of areas like the tech side that goes so fast forward, there always pops up new things that you’ve never tried or done before, and then you’re doing some thing for like the first time where you always have to try things and you get stuck in a dead end some times and you have to try and find a new lane.

Pelaaja: Yeah like you said before you got a small team which has some pro’s but probably some con’s as well like trying to get it done in time, i mean why have you decided to keep it so small? Is it merely financial or for the control?

Sam Lake: Well, of course there’s the control issue and there’s always when you want the thing to ”work” lets say that an aggressive expansion that in itself besides being a challenging project there’s been some alarming examples of that the whole thing could go wrong and then suddenly you can’t get anything done anymore, we’ve never really wanted to go in that direction. We’re moving cautiously and keeping the game at a priority.

Pelaaja: Well what can you tell us about this Alan Wake trailer which will in two weeks or so be showing on the big screen, I mean whats the idea behind this trailer, is it to remind us that the game actually exists or show how it’s changed in some way or…

Sam Lake: Well, I have to say that often during these kinds of things you think really carefully that when and what, I have to admit that this took off more like a joke [Laughs]. Like when we happen to have this situation that Max Payne: The Movie is coming. We probably wouldn’t be releasing a trailer at this point were it not for that fact. When we talked about that and talked about how both Max Payne and Alan Wake share this cinematic origin that mirrors in the gaming world TV-series and movies. It started to feel like a fun idea that now might actually be a chance to see a clip of Alan Wake on the big screen and see how it felt like, and since we’re here in Finland among friends we figured that OK, lets make a trailer for this occasion, when we talked it through it was accomplished rather easily that.. we got to show it. So thats pretty much whats behind this whole thing, it’s not like we sat around for a long time thinking about when would be the right time to come back into the limelight and what message to send out and what to show. I Should probably say the the principal idea with this whole thing is just to “enjoy” Alan Wake and show a glimpse of what it looks like right now and remind people that a bit further in the future people will have the chance to get some “hands on” time and experience the gameplay but not just yet.

Pelaaja: I have to ask about the Max Payne movie, I mean how does it feel like now, having made the game and actually written the story [interruption: (there's actually two different guys doing the interview) the other one jumps in here and quips how remarkable this actually is here in finland etc)] and years ago having created this thing [incoherent]

Sam Lake: I mean almost 10 years it flew back and forth in the Hollywood system, obviously it’s a very cool thing overall and err a bit surreal feeling, you can’t really get it through your head. Bit of mixed feelings, I mean it’s really nice and cool to think that we made something that interested people over there enough that they wanted to take it and do their own vision and version of it but of course you’re a bit nervous/excited since anything made related to Max Payne thus far has been very close and this movie is something you haven’t seen and haven’t had a single hand in the making of the movie, I have no clue of what might be shown. But overall it’s really nice either way.

Pelaaja: Like if you look some ten years back Mark Wahlberg was Marky Mark underwear model [Laughs] and now he’s playing Max Payne, I mean everybody’s probably seen the trailer by now and I got to say I was surprised how much…

Sam Lake: There’s also that graphic novel styled trailer where lines were picked directly from the movie, I’m not assuming that it represents what the movie will be like…

Pelaaja: Probably not…

Sam Lake: It was more likely aimed at people already familiar with the game to remind of these ties between the game… but..

Pelaaja: I wonder if there will be like in the Doom movie where there was this couple minutes long FPS-sequence [Laughs] If they pull the camera a bit back and max…

Sam Lake: Well you’d think that there would be some bullet-time at some point of the movie, I don’t know :D

Pelaaja: I read somewhere, not sure where but that there’s going to be like a gamers edition of the movie…

Sam Lake: :D haven’t heard of that one.

Pelaaja: They said something about the narrative being more slow paced or something.. Can’t really remember where I read this I got to look it up that i’m not spewing bullshit or been dreaming… [other guy: it's a bit surreal yeah]

Sam Lake: True true

Pelaaja: And judging from the trailer it looks a lot better than many other game movies *cough* alone in the dark *cough*

Sam Lake: Well experience tells me that you can make a good trailer of anything but err but it’s not like it ever made me worry when I saw those [incoherent babble with people talking over eachother] exactly… I personally like the choice of Mark Wahlberg I think he fits pretty well there is like when thinking about the development arc of Max1 that you start of from that idyllic that that… Wahlberg has that nice father, young father feeling to him.

Pelaaja: What about thinking into the future is there any completion of the circle sort of :D, Max Payne, your first game is becoming a movie and before that movie a trailer of your next game will be shown.

Sam Lake: Well yeah I guess the whole idea kinda started from that, it just felt convenient/right. Lets see where we end up with this.

Pelaaja: Well with Wake and all the movie rights and stuff are in your hands..

Sam Lake: Yeah of course… well with Max Payne we actually sold the movie rights before the first game was ever released.

Pelaaja: Oh it went like that?

Sam Lake: yeah, and when that opportunity arose it felt like we have to do this deal and the fact that they made lots of news about that felt important at that point. But after that it’s been laying low showing it’s head every now and then with some info coming out that said person is attached to the project now etc and then it’s gone silent again… Sooo probably with Wake now we’ll be thinking hard what we really want to do with it and move forward with that and not simply sell it to the first guy who makes an offer.

Pelaaja: Lets move back to the actual game, could you describe your role over the years as the writer and probably the large impact you have on the design overall.. How do you, like when production moves from concept to prototype and so forth, how does your role change and shape there in that process?

Sam Lake: Well it’s only natural, for all the different roles in the team really, some phases of the development are much busier and then it calms down again. But yeah as writers at remedy we keep the story aspect as really important part of the game and err.. We start with thinking of the “vision” and themes and idea, the story part is there from the very beginning, you start to think of who the main character is and where this takes place and what are the overarching themes that are part of playable stuff and some of the story…
So we start from that, then the tech part jumps aboard and says what even is possible etc. and what kind of gameplay we mean to have. We do this all in a group, we have the lead guys from the different areas sitting together and make this sort of “vision” define the core of the game and what the basic gameplay is. And it’s really important that we have all the different areas represented there and we don’t miss anything important so that when we spread out a bit and start working everybody’s on the same wavelength, it’s a common/united “vision”.
After that stage, as a writer you do the games synopsis, plot synopsis, everything that happens etc, obviously you have to think about writing plot that enables the basic gameplay. Plus all about the games world and location and the different places you want to have there, there’s lots of these elements that sort of come from outside the story that the story has to enable and support well, I mean the game story is bad if it doesn’t pick playable elements to the front and support them. That’s sort of the plot synopsis phase. Of course the writers part is very similar to that of a TV-writer of movie writer, we sort of first have this pitch where we throw the vision for a ride (man this part of the translation is horrible :P) then when we know a little bit more about the game we get to the plot synopsis. After that we’re working with a bit more people that kinda “Level-breakdown” thing. Sort of divide the pack thematically into segments.
And at that point the whole thing still lives quite a lot. Like in the plot synopsis of Max Payne there could often be this part which say: “The Mobsters attack, Max fights them, shoots them and continues his journey.” And it’s like one line in the plot synopsis which might be some huge part of some dialogue with some character but in relation to the game the discussion is a couple of ten seconds, that one line in the synopsis spreads out to this huge bullet ballet which lasts 30mins of game time. Thats why we have this “level breakdown” phase where we figure out how long these things are in actual game time. And when we got that, in the writing department we start doing these different scenes and stuff which starts to look pretty close to a script, dialogue is still missing at that point. But already at that point we start to shape what is like a cutscene and what’s in-game and that sorta things.

Pelaaja: The process probably “lives” a lot [babble]

Sam Lake: Yeah yeah, and a good example of this comes from Max Payne again, Max Payne 1 which was a much longer project than the sequel, the script was like 150 pages and the sequel which was a remarkably shorter project the script was 650 pages and thats simply because in the sequel phase everything is clear, you know whats possible and how this thing works, naturally you know all the characters and it’s much easier to create some new material for them, you don’t have to stop all the time to think if this is right or wrong for this characters personality. So for a writer doing a sequel can be very fun, you don’t have to think about all the technical limitations and problems when you know the deal, you can concentrate on making the story which sort of enables some extra depth.
And oh well after that you go into the scripting phase and you write the dialogue, then you already have very precise plans on what’s going on in what section of the game and what kind of small forking/nonlinearity you got there what other characters you got running around under the games control what kind of lines you need for them and what kind of different situations you can expect that you have to take into account, that sort of stuff.
Again with experience from Max, you bang together as much material as you can so that at the point where they pull the script from your hand saying that they got to do the voice over work now, so thats that.

Pelaaja: So how much voice-work has been done already?

Sam Lake: Well it’s done along the way in many different segments, so that we keep clearly up to date and have a good picture of what material we got together

Pelaaja: If we would jump back to Max Payne 2, Rockstar games worked closely with you there, what was that like? Cos those guys are very much interested in the “vibe” and story. Could you perhaps elaborate a bit about that.

Sam Lake: well yeah, well I have to say that in a lot of ways they trusted in us and we had pretty much creative freedom to develop all sorts of stuff. Of Course they were interested but in a way I remember that they were just “digging” the stuff that was created. Felt very good to work together with those guys, and in reality we worked pretty much with the same guys already when making Max1, for example Navid Consar (Not sure if this is how the name I spelled) who directed our voice overs and worked closely with us on the casting and also directed motion-capture stunts for max2.

Pelaaja: If I recall correctly he had the same jobs for all GTA games up to San Andreas

Sam Lake: Yup, he’s got his own company nowadays doing freelance work and he’s doing the voice-overs for Alan Wake as well.

Pelaaja: Alright, it’s good to know that the co-operation has worked…

Sam Lake: Yeah it’s worked really well, it’s “synced” really well with Navid, in a way, he understands very quickly what we’re looking for and what we want.

Pelaaja: Professional guy…

Sam Lake: Yeah definitely.

Pelaaja: OK, so, there’s been a lot more discussion about games scripts in the last few years

Sam Lake: Yeah, it’s great :D

Pelaaja: Overall what Marc Laidlaw and Valve is doing has been good, [Sam agrees] Bioshock [Sam: Definitely] this year at GDC when Ken Levine talked about production and the script and Susan O’Connor who worked on that, who also happened to work on Gears of War where there really isn’t much plot to speak of :D, But then again they only bought the “pitch” from O’Connor and then that was that [Sam agreeing]

Sam Lake: Yeah and in Gears there was sort of this feeling that they had to cut a lot and change a lot on the final stretch, felt like the plots red line was sort of missing at times.

Pelaaja: Then again looking at Bioshock where O’connor was involved from the beginning to the end and you can pretty much see it as a positive thing in that game.

Sam Lake: Well I think that in a game where you really want to have a strong story element that there’s no point in not having the writer involved from the very beginning to the end. From my own experience there’s always more than enough work for the writer from the very start of the project all the way to the… in Max Payne 2 the last changes in dialogue were done 2 weeks before going gold. Then Navid still had to do his last voice-over session and then it was done.

Pelaaja: Some important work is still done near the end..

Sam Lake: As well of course when you start to see the thing in its pretty much final form then you start seeing that: well there’s a problem and thats missing over there and that should be changed. But you always have to put a stop somewhere and it’s good enough, I mean you could probably work on things infinitely and that wouldn’t necessarily even improve the final product after a certain point.

Pelaaja: And now we come to this that when you’ve worked on Alan Wake for a long time do you go blind, that at some time you should just get I done and…

Sam Lake: err yeah well probably in every creative project when working for a long time, going blind to your own creation is unavoidable. In a long project you can always at some point put a certain thing to to rest for awhile and get back to it later and you’ll see much clearer, obviously there’s always external feedback which is absolutely necessary and very important, I feel that we do this very well, we can easily get feedback thanks to several support groups, very professional people that we have that fill that role. About the blindness , I think that often when talking about your own stuff, more than often the bar starts to climb higher and higher even if it really wouldn’t have to. You got some really great stuff together but you yourself are very critical about it, thats sort of a pretty natural thing. But I don’t really think we’ve really gotten lost on such tracks with Alan Wake.

Pelaaja: Well, still about the writing, as a writer myself, what kind of games do you appreciate? Have you been looking at some of the more recent games that have come out in the past few years? Any special cases which come to mind?

Sam Lake: Well yeah, I mean the for-mentioned titles, from the story side of things have interested me. I’ve always liked more of the RPG stuff since there’s naturally a bit more story usually in those games, perhaps the problem nowadays is that when you got a family and you’re a dad, and you already have a busy time at work, those RPG games where you should invest 40-60hours sometimes get left on the the shelf when you realize you won’t be able to finish them anyway. So since I like the story side of things you like to get the whole experience, if you know that you won’t even be finishing this it sort of reduces ( I assume he’s talking about the amount of games he plays). I really really liked the orange box for instance, Portal was absolutely fabulous, mm with minimal elements they tell a lot of story. It was also a more fitting game for my schedule [Laughs]. But at the same time those Half-Life 2 episodes, was it episode2? Where near the end you had lots of npc’s which joined you in the complex at the end, I thought that was really good.

Pelaaja: Yeah well episode 1, I thought episode 2 improved upon it a lot

Sam Lake: Yeah I agree, I had really positive feelings near the end, that now they’re catering for me that for which I have played many hours waiting for, it was great.

Pelaaja: In action movies and in games dialogue must be really hard to write when you need to condense lots of important info into a line or two.

Sam Lake: It’s hard, but the limitations are often a positive thing, the tighter the frames you can put around it, like these are the tools you got and with these you have to get it done. It really brings some creative stuff forth. For instance you have this much time to get this much info and when you can’t make it work you have to find new ways of doing it and usually it makes the end result much better.

Pelaaja: Have you played Metal Gear Solid 4?

Sam Lake: Eh no, I haven’t, I looked at it when people were playing it at the office.

Pelaaja: It has some 20 – 30 minute long cutscenes [rambling]

Sam Lake: Yeah yeh, well there’s really nothing wrong with that, I notice in my own work, the most usual feedback you get as a writer is that somethings too long regarding pretty much anything. Be it on a higher plot level or simply some piece of dialogue they often say it’s a tad too long. And you always feel a bit let down when you’ve put much effort into it while being in the “zone”. But I’ve learned well over the years that the more you can cut and the more you can tighten it up that the end result more often than not gets better.

Pelajaa: Well what about the way the story is told in Alan Wake, are there any cut-scenes? Or is everything told like in Half-Life? Or what do you prefer? What has the vision been?

Sam Lake: Well err, well I guess when we’re talking about a game we try and put the plot and the story as much as possible a part of the game it’s sort of the overall strive, but we’re not really on some purist line where we say absolutely no to cinematics, they serve their purpose. Certain plot elements work better with cinematics, or lets say that we couldn’t really have any of those in the games story if they had to be changed to be a part of the gameplay. Looking at Max Payne we always have that cinema likeness or TV-likness in the back of our heads, and sometimes we jump into a short cut-scene where we pull out the shaky-cam and that sorts of elements that are familiar in modern TV-shows, it serves its purpose. Of course we also WANT to use these elements.

Pelaaja: What about err how seriously is the material handled when talking about Alan Wake?
Max Payne obviously was a very different case [Sam: yes it was] there was humor but also very serious stuff.

Sam Lake: Well it’s a thriller of course so the overall tone… The idea is that at times you’re scared, for real, and err we never really turn it into all out comedy, somehow the characters in the gameworld wouldn’t believe in it. But my feeling is that humor is a necessary part of the game. Like looking at someone playing a game, the player is the one who creates funny things, be it part of the developers goal or whatever humor is still created there, and as a writer I feel that you have to take that into account and you have to sort of mirror it in the story and the “vibe” (sorry guys i’m not really sure what he meant here :D). So when it turns to comedy in certain places then somehow the same class of comedy would be present in the plot. I guess I could almost say that the overall feeling is sort of like Max Payne. The genre, the style of the story is different than Max’s sort of over the top pulp cop thing. There’s that certain serious side at some places, we really dialed it up a notch which I also think feels right in the context of the game, and of course there’s also some humor there. And if you look at our inspiration like Twin Peaks for instance a certain kind of american small town atmosphere, I mean it’s part of the deal that there’s some batshit crazy people there and strange happenings and from that angle there’s will be some humor.

Pelaaja: What about, there’s been talks about for some years about making episodic style games like Half-Life2, what do you think, does wake sort of fit the bill or does the story reach a conclusion at the end?

Sam Lake: Yeah well, our goal was from the start that the Alan Wake experience would be sort of like you’re handed the DVD-boxset for one season of a TV-Series, we’ve split up the game and the plot sort of like a TV-series, the whole package is divided into “episodes”…

Pelaaja: Like we talked previously about not having time to play a game through anymore, is Alan Wake sort of like you can play some…

Sam Lake: Yeah yeah, but I have to say that it’s part of the format that an episode can end in an intolerable cliffhanger. And just like watching a good TV-series from a DVD, it’s 2 o’clock in the morning and you should wake up for work in the morning but juuust one more episode. So thats kind of our goal, that you’d get a similar experience
It also means that we conclude on story but leave some things open for like “the next season”. But also in my opinion you can’t really leave the thing completely open, it would be sort of like a scam when you think how tight experiences tv-series are and how often new seasons are released..

pelaaja: As long as there isn’t a writers strike [laughs]

Sam Lake: But it’s known that making a sequel of a videogame takes a lot longer than one summer, so you can’t assume that when you leave a devastating cliffhanger [pelaaja:*cough* Halo2 *cough*] [Laughs], yeah I think that you have to take it to a satisfying enough conclusion.

Pelaaja: What else is there? No point in asking when the game will be out?

Sam Lake: WID

[Some random comparison with DNF, Chinese democracy and Alan Wake ]

[Talking about DNF, how it actually might come out now with some new info being released but that it has actually been so long in development that people don't even believe it exists]

Pelaaja: Still we can probably assume that there’s more development time BEHIND Alan Wake than in front of it?

Sam Lake: Sure yeah, I have to say that i’ve got a damn good feeling regarding the project, we’ve got some good stuff up and running.

Pelaaja: Well you had some good stuff up and running 3 years ago

Sam Lake: Yeah true but…

Pelaaja: Do you ever get bored about the project having worked on it for so long?

Sam Lake: Well naturally, you got some days when you’re not really that excited about some thing, then again you get other days when you’re really excited. I think it’s a great thing in a teamwork situation that often the excitement/inspiration comes via some other area of the project, like you’ve previously done this one thing and it’s put forward in the project, like there’s going to be enviroments made for this specific thing. Then you’ve sort of forgotten about it and moved to some other thing, then some day when your own work is pretty much at a halt you see the end result of that previous thing that someone did, thats always really amazing. Through that you get inspired over and over again. I have to say there are some amazingly talented people on our team and almost every time being a writer you imagine the scenes and locations in your head, I gotta say that the stuff the gameplay guys or level artists churn out surpasses that.

Pelaaja: And even though the development has taken this long it doesn’t necessarily mean that somethings have gone to hell during the development process.

Sam Lake: No no, definitely not

–

That’s it. There’s only a bit of chit-chat afterwards and such it was not translated but a huge thanks to Jokke_r for doing this!