If you’re an Alan Wake fan, then you’ve likely been patiently waiting for a sequel to come out for nearly nine years. Well, hopefully, you have a lot more patience, because a sequel isn’t coming anytime soon.
Remedy (the studio behind Alan Wake) has been hard at work on their next game Control, which is due out this August. At PAX East, Remedy’s Director Of Communications Thomas Puha was in attendance to talk about their next game. Sure enough, questions about their original action horror franchise came about. The answers didn’t seem very optimistic.
“We were working on Alan Wake 2 years ago and it just didn’t pan out, so there’s nothing," said Puha. He would go on to explain that Remedy was “booked solid for the next couple of years,” as they are still finishing Control, and also working on the Korean series, Crossfire, as well as a secret new project. So, it seems that Remedy is already stretched a bit thin, meaning there’s no room on the schedule right now for an Alan Wake sequel.
On the plus side, Puha also mentioned that Remedy still owns the rights to the Alan Wake series, meaning that they don’t need to go through anyone to get a sequel greenlit. Which is good, considering their previous publishing partner Microsoft doesn’t have any interest in sequels to Wake or Remedy’s last game Quantum Break.
It’s been a while since we’ve seen Alan Wake in action. The fictional writer made his debut in 2010, and his only other appearance so far has been the spin-off, but not quite full-on sequel, Alan Wake’s American Nightmare in 2012. Fans have been patiently waiting for a proper sequel. It’s been teased for a while now, and even the game’s developers want one to happen.
Fan especially want another game in order to close out the story, since there were a lot of open plot threads left dangling. It’s actually pretty appropriate that the game would leave so many unanswered questions, considering one of its biggest inspirations was Twin Peaks, another property well known for creating mysteries and not solving them.
Alan Wake aficionados still potentially have something to look forward to, even if it’s not necessarily a video game. A TV adaptation of the game was announced in September of 2018, and is presumably still moving forward. So, while you may not be able to get the story through an interactive medium, at least there could still be some satisfying payoffs on the small screen.
Alan Wake 2 looks to be a long, long ways off, if it even gets made at all. However, if you enjoy Remedy’s brand of weirdness and slo-mo shooting, Control is due out this summer on August 27, 2019. It’ll be available on Ps4, Xbox One, and will be exclusive to the Epic Games Store on PC. Who knows, maybe if it sells well enough, Alan Wake may surface from the lake one more time.
