Remedy's Matias Myllyrinne

There are a lot of feeling that come with such a project. Excitement is one, and you have those butterflies in your belly, because you're now letting go of something you've built for such a long time, and wanted to create.

Being able to share that with people is an awesome time, but also from a personal perspective, we know it's good - we've had a very warm reception, and people who have played the game have been very kind to us.

So we're thrilled to be able to share it, but from a company responsibility point of view, of course you always have those butterflies.

Well, I haven't had the opportunity to play Heavy Rain yet - it's on my to-play list along with some other stuff, and I've had to neglect some of my gaming... but there's a tonne of stuff I want to attack, and that's a game I definitely want to play.

I think, conceptually, if you look at Alan Wake as a game - every game is a reflection of the team that created it, right? So it's a psychological action thriller from the guys that made Max Payne, and industry professionals and maybe the hardcore fans will see certain things, certain techniques that we've done before - but applied to a thriller.

So for example, we're using an active cameraman to cover our movement, slowing down time for those near-miss moments, highlighting yourself so if an enemy is sneaking up behind you we go into this classical thriller camera pan - we pull the camera out and you see yourself from the perspective of the predator, and yourself as the victim if you will.

We're doing these little things and gelling them into the gameplay, so the game is driving this kind of stuff - taking what we've done before and applying it to a different genre.

I don't know, I think there are a lot of awesome games. We're in a golden age of game development in a lot of ways - we're blessed with really great, polished stuff. For us we wanted to do something unique, and wanted to push the envelope on a few areas, a few fronts, and focus on those.

So with Max Payne we used time as a gameplay element. With Alan Wake we wanted to use light - both are constants and easy to get into, and maybe better played than explained... but just building something unique and blending that into the fiction takes a lot of time. You're not doing an iteration of what you've done before, or what somebody else has done before.

For example, Max Payne 2 - a sequel that was fairly well reviewed - that was an 18-month development cycle and I think Metacritic put it at about the same as the original, 87 or 88. You can iterate, but if you want to do something more innovative, and do something new, sometimes those prototypes don't always work out the first time around, and you need to go back to the drawing board.

I think there are two things. We did make one big mistake, and we came back from that - it was trying to make a sandbox structure to a thriller, and that just really wasn't working. It felt deluded, and the pacing wasn't right - for a thriller the pacing is important, you need a bit of foreshadowing.

We probably threw away six months of work, which doesn't sound that bad, but it's a lot of work with substantial teams... we saw we could deliver an okay game, but it wasn't going to be a heart-pounding ride, it wasn't going to be a thriller in the true sense of the word.

So we went back and redesigned that - although that in itself doesn't explain such a long development cycle, but we also put a huge upfront investment into building the procedural tools. There were certain things that we wanted to achieve, and we built the technology to fulfil the vision - as opposed to seeing what we could do with existing tech.

Clearly that kind of thing takes time as well, but the level of authenticity, having the huge view distances in the Pacific North-West, being able to have that living, breathing world - that vibe - it's not a tube or a cardboard cut-out.... building that took a lot of time.

And also, we're fairly ambitious - and if you're betting the farm you might as well get it right. Part of the thing is that you're only as good as your last game, and fundamentally I think it's better to take that extra time.

We had the whole game fully playable around E3 last year, and we've just been balancing, tuning, polishing and iterating in post-production since. Games are fairly expensive, and if you put down 60 Euros, the Remedy brand has to stand for something - otherwise people aren't going to come back.

Yes - and that's a key thing. If you've put down a large upfront investment you're going to get downstream return from having that technology base.

That being said, I think we'll always continue to iterate and get more out of the tech - but it's definitely not built for a one-off. That doesn't make sense.