A Look at What Once Was Alan Wake 2

I’m going to start this article with a disclaimer: it’s never easy or fun to admit as a Games Journalist that you’d be better served going to another site, but if you’re a really invested fan of Alan Wake 2, you’d be better served just reading the Polygon article that revealed this bit of news. If you’re just a casual fan or you’re not interested in a long read, feel free to stay for the summarized version here.

Alright, we good to go? Well, as the disclaimer above said, Polygon recently published a pretty big article about the planned, then un-planned, than possibly re-planned sequel to 2010’s psychological action-horror Alan Wake.

That’s right, Remedy (the developers) did, in fact, plan a sequel. They even produced a whole gameplay demo in-house, although it was never released to the public… until now. Check it out below, it’s certainly worth a look, and will be extremely familiar to fans of the game.



Nothing out of the ordinary, but the quickly glanced puzzle-solving tool of turning spiritual objects real certainly looks new.

Now, it’s not unusual for games to start development only to stop abruptly, because the Game’s Industry is a fickle place built on a foundation of broken dreams. But what happened to Alan Wake 2, specifically? Well, parsed down from the original article, Alan Wake 2 might yet happen, but many of the things developed for the fledgling game were instead borrowed for other games—namely Alan Wake: American Nightmare, and, more substantially, Quantum Break. According to Creative Director Sam Lake:

“[Microsoft] have been really supportive about Alan Wake and Phil Spencer has been awesomely supportive when it comes to Remedy and Alan Wake along the way. We showed it to Microsoft and I guess at the time Microsoft was looking for something slightly different for their portfolio. Quite quickly our discussion about Alan Wake 2 turned into something else and that something else turned into Quantum Break, which was great and very exciting.”

Of course, Quantum Break is still happening, but Mr. Lake did say that Remedy was shifting gears away from it, and an Alan Wake sequel could still happen. But if it will, well… time will tell.  Either way, this is a pretty interesting look at the internal workings of the games industry, and some exciting news for Alan Wake fans as well!