Remedy teases Alan Wake's American Nightmare for PC
Plus, why it wasn't made for PSN as well as XBLA.
Will Alan Wake's American Nightmare follow Alan Wake's lead and launch on PC after releasing on Xbox 360?
Developer Remedy has delivered a strong hint that it will.
"PC gaming is part of our heritage," Remedy head of franchise development Oskari Hakkinen told Eurogamer when we asked him that very question. "PC gaming is close to our hearts. We'll make it happen if we can."
Alan Wake's American Nightmare, which launches on XBLA tomorrow, is a standalone, more action-oriented experience than Alan Wake.
It's set in a fictional episode of Night Springs, the Twilight Zone-style TV show that appeared in Alan Wake, and sees the grumpy writer face off against waves of enemies with an arsenal of weapons.
While a PC release sounds like a sure thing, one platform American Nightmare will never release on is the PlayStation 3.
That's because during the game's eight month development, Remedy decided it would be an XBLA-only title. The Finnish developer then approached Microsoft with a "nearly finished" game. And Microsoft said, yes please.
But why not create American Nightmare for PlayStation Network as well as XBLA? Remedy is the Alan Wake IP holder after all.
"We didn't develop for PlayStation because our engine is customised for Xbox, not to say we couldn't ever do PlayStation, but it just would have required a lot more work to then start doing it for PlayStation," Hakkinen said.
"And we had a relationship with Microsoft already. We showed the game to them, and they were like, this is awesome. Let's put it out. Once you've got a relationship going, things are a lot easier. Once you've got the hotline to call the right people and say, this is what we're doing, and there's mutual respect there, they say, you guys do quite good stuff, we like it, so come over and show it."
Remedy's negotiations with Microsoft over American Nightmare were very different to its talks with the Xbox 360 manufacturer over exclusivity for Alan Wake, Hakkinen said, suggesting American Nightmare won't take as long to arrive on PC as Alan Wake did.
"We did a lot of the stuff before approaching MS," Hakkinen explained. "We had the game pretty much in the can.
"We self-funded the whole thing. It's like, this is it. Negotiations were very different."