If you click on a link and make a purchase we may receive a small commission. Read our editorial policy.
“I really, really, desperately wanted him to start it off.”
Famed writer Stephen King granted Remedy the rights to use his infamous quote that opens the original Alan Wake for the nominal sum of just $1.
Alan Wake memorably begins with a voiceover from the game’s main character quoting King in a description of what nightmares really mean.
Speaking to Eurogamer, Remedy boss Sam Lake revealed he had “really, really, desperately wanted” to be able to open the game with a quote from King himself – whose style matches much of the spooky supernatural horror that follows.
Luckily, King was on board with the idea too.
“Creating the original Alan Wake, I really, really desperately wanted a quote from him to start it off,” Lake told Eurogamer’s Chris Tapsell in an interview this month at Summer Game Fest. “It’s my understanding he wanted $1 for us to get the rights to use it. [It was] so very generous.”
Lake was speaking ahead of his appearance at Tribeca Festival where he discussed the horror genre – somewhere King has also appeared for similar conversations.
“Obviously he has done a lot of that,” Lake continued. “So I’m sure we will be talking about Stephen King influences in [Alan Wake], among other things.”
Alan Wake and its sequel feature numerous nods to King throughout – alongside other influences such as the works of HP Lovecraft, and the TV shows Twin Peaks and The Twilight Zone.
The first game begins with a sequence where we see Alan Wake driving through the lonely countryside, over which we hear him deliver the following lines:
“Stephen King once wrote that ‘Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there’s little fun to be had in explanations; they’re antithetical to the poetry of fear.’
“In a horror story, the victim keeps asking ‘why?’ But there can be no explanation, and there shouldn’t be one. The unanswered mystery is what stays with us the longest, and it’s what we’ll remember in the end. My name is Alan Wake, I’m a writer.”
King’s quote used in Alan Wake comes from an article penned by the author for Entertainment Weekly back in 2008. Entitled “Why Hollywood can’t do horror“, it discusses the failures of big budget studios to properly capture fear while courting mass market audiences.
Look out for more from Eurogamer’s time with Sam Lake on the site very soon. In the meantime, here’s our latest look at how Alan Wake 2 – Remedy’s first proper survival horror game – is shaping up.
