Remedy Entertainment is a Video Game developing company based in Espoo, Finland. Remedy was founded in 1995 by demoscene members from groups such as Future Crew. The year after Remedy released its first game Death Rally, a top-down perspective racing shooter published by Apogee (later 3D Realms) and distributed by GT Interactive Software. In 2001, Remedy released its second game Max Payne. The game is best known for its film noir influences and popularizing bullet time in video games. Remedy sold all the rights to Max Payne in 2002 to Take-Two Interactive for US$10 million and 969,932 shares of stock. The following year, a sequel to the franchise developed by Remedy and Rockstar Games was released. This would be Remedy's last Max Payne game, as Rockstar continued developing the franchise on its own.
Remedy would later work on Quantum Break, which was announced during the Xbox One event on 21 May 2013. The game was released on April 5, 2016. During the development of Quantum Break, the CEO of Remedy, Matias Myllyrinne, and Oskari Häkkinen, the head of franchise development, departed from the company. Remedy later announced the formation of a new team and that they're working on two projects. The first being a partnership with Smilegate on the single-player component of Crossfire X. The second being published by 505 Games, which revealed at E3 2018 to be Control.
Games developed:
- Death Rally (1996) (PC)
- Death Rally (2011) (Android, iPhone/iPod, PC)
- Max Payne (2001) (PC, Xbox, PS2, GBA, Android, iOS)
- Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne (2003)
- Alan Wake (2010) (PC, Xbox 360)
- Alan Wake: The Signal (DLC)
- Alan Wake: The Writer (DLC)
- Alan Wake's American Nightmare (2012) (PC, Xbox 360)
- Quantum Break (2016) (PC, Xbox One)
- Control (2019) (PC, Xbox One, PS4)
- Control: The Foundation (DLC)
- Control: AWE (DLC)
- Alan Wake Remastered (2021)
- Crossfire X (single player campaign) (2022)
- Alan Wake II (2023)
- Alan Wake II: Night Springs (DLC)
- Alan Wake II: The Lake House (DLC)
Upcoming Projects:
- Max Payne 1 + 2 Remake (TBA) note
- Project Condor (TBA)
- Kestrel (TBA)
- Control 2 (TBA)
Tropes used in Remedy games:
- Creator Cameo:
- Sam Lake, Creative Director and writer at Remedy, shows up in roles of varying importance in several projects, usually portraying an actual character, and occasionally As Himself or as The Danza. In Alan Wake, Lake appears As Himself on an optional broadcast of The Harry Garrett Show, giving his famous Max Payne scowl, and in the sequel, in addition to lending his likeness to FBI Agent Alex Casey, he also appears as an actor named Sam Lake playing Detective Alex Casey in film adaptations of Alan's in-universe Alex Casey novels.
- Any time there's an opportunity to show a name, Remedy likes to mix in the names of their staff. For example, Senior Community Manager Vida Starčević appears on a memorial plaque in the Investigations Sector in the AWE DLC in Control, and reportedly, some of the names that appear on the plaque in Suomi Hall in Alan Wake II are "Finnicized" versions of Remedy staff names.
- Creator Thumbprint: All of their original full-length games (beside Death Rally) have been third-person shooters with Mind Screwy plots based around a semi-localized breakdown of reality where the protagonist wears a dark jacket (usually leather), comes from a broken family, and has some kind of powers which involves time. Control generally follows most of that, barring the time powers.
- Also, Medium Blending, Live-Action Cutscenes and segments, with Alan Wake relegating them to in-game TV screens; American Nightmare, Control, and Alan Wake II adding full live-action cutscenes, and Quantum Break having a full-length companion drama series.
- Descended Creator: Remedy has a long history of utilizing its own staff as actors, particularly Creative Director Sam Lake.
- Max Payne: Lake famously lent his likeness to the titular character in the first game, due to a lack of funds to hire actual actors for the cast. Although Max's model was recast in later entries in the series so that Lake could focus on writing, many fans to this day consider him the definitive face of Max Payne.
- Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne: Lake appears as an actor in several Shows Within a Show that Max can watch, including John Mirra in Address Unknown and the villainous mother of the male protagonist in Lords and Ladies.
- Max Payne 3: In a Mythology Gag, a police sketch of Max Payne, likeness now based on his longtime voice actor James McCaffrey, has Lake's face.
- Quantum Break: Lake portrays FBI Agent Alex Casey in a trailer for an Alan Wake-written movie. He also appears as a member of the emo band My Bleeding Clock, as seen by a poster Jack owned in his youth.
- Alan Wake II:
- Lake performs the most acting he's ever done yet as FBI Agent Alex Casey, whom he performed motion capture for and lent his likeness to, and also as "Aleksi Kesä" in the 20-minute Finnish-language "Yötön Yö" short film, where he acts in live-action, and in Finnish with his own voice.
- Live-action cinematics director Anssi Määttä has a few vocal cameos as Tapio Annala, a quirky Watery resident who is heard as a caller in a few radio broadcasts and as a customer testimonial in a Koskela brothers' advertisement.
- Doppelgänger:
- Alan Wake has Mr Scratch, and it is implied he himself is one for Thomas Zane.
- Jesse Faden has the Hiss corrupted esseJ
- Ironically, Jack Joyce does not have one, despite being the only protagonist portrayed by an actor who has an identical twin. Averted in Alan Wake II, which introduces Bright Falls Sheriff Tim Breaker, played by Ashmore. Though he never meets Joyce, it's clear both in-universe (and out) that he's meant to be Joyce's counterpart.
- He Also Did: Futuremark, the creators of the long-running 3DMark series of PC benchmarking tools, was spun off of Remedy all the way back in 1997, and the first release of 3DMark utilized an early version of the engine that Remedy would go on to use for the first Max Payne game.
- Icy Blue Eyes: The majority of their main protagonists (Max Payne as played by Sam Lake, Alan Wake, Jack Joyce and Jesse Faden) share this trait.
- Ink-Suit Actor: As far back as the first Max Payne game, Remedy has modeled the majority of characters in its games directly off of actual people's likenesses rather than designing them from scratch. This has the secondary effect of making it possible for them to utilize Medium Blending in the form of live-action footage and photographs, which started out as a cost-saving measure before gradually becoming part of Remedy's Signature Style. To quote Shawn Ashmore on Twitter
:"I will never forget loading the game and seeing the opening scene and the university campus for the first time. Being apart of films and television is surreal but controlling a character that looks exactly like you hits different!" - Learnt English from Watching Television: According to an interview, Matthew Porretta, impressed with the quality of the script for this game made by a bunch of Finns for whom English is not their first language, asked the writers at Remedy how they got the dialogue to sound so natural and not stilted. They replied simply that they learned from American film and TV, which is shown in Finland with subtitles at most, and is almost never dubbed into their language outside of children's media.
- Local Reference: The studio loves sneaking in references to their home country of Finland, with the reoccurring town of Watery being made up of Finnish immigrants, to oddball Finnish janitor Ahti, who either shares his name with the Finnish pagan god of water or is the Finnish water god, making a cameo no matter how implausible. Alan Wake II contains the most references yet as the player is finally able to visit Watery, which features a sauna, lots of Finnish-language signage, the Kalevala Knights motorcycle club, the Koskela brothers with their Kitschy Local Commercial about "the Finnish way" to drink Ahma Beer, and a little Finnish flair in the Coffee World amusement park (also run by the Koskelas), which sells toy puukkos (a traditional Finnish knife). Many save points in AW2 also have a plate of Karelian pies, open-faced savory pies with a rye crust, alongside the coffee thermos used to save the game, which is also a reference as Finland consumes the most coffee per capita in the world.
- Parental Abandonment: Every Remedy protagonist thus far has come from a broken family, with both parents absent and/or dead prior to the start of the story. Max Payne's father was abusive and then he was orphaned by age fourteen, in addition to him losing his wife and infant daughter at the start of his story. Alan Wake was raised by a single mother who was in and out of mental institutions throughout his childhood. Jack Joyce was orphaned in a car accident and became estranged from his brother, his only surviving family, shortly thereafter. Jesse Faden was orphaned in a paranatural disaster and her brother was taken by the FBC. Saga Anderson never knew her father and her mother became estranged from her family, and then passed sometime prior to the start of the game.
- Production Posse: Throughout the years and across Remedy's numerous franchises, a group of actors now make regular appearances in most of the Remedy games, including:
- Before his passing in December 2023, James McCaffrey was the voice of Max Payne as well as his Self-Parody Alex Casey and poet Thomas Zane in Alan Wake. He also voiced Zachariah Trench in Control.
- Matthew Porretta is the voice of Alan Wake in all of Wake's appearances, as well as Mr. Scratch in Alan Wake's American Nightmare, and Dr. Casper Darling in Control.
- Ilkka Villi is the Motion Capture and likeness for Alan Wake in all of his appearances as well as Alan's doppelganger Mr. Scratch in Alan Wake's American Nightmare, and he also portrays Thomas Zane in both face and voice in Control and Alan Wake II.
- Poets of the Fall, who regularly make music for Remedy games, have played both Fake Band Old Gods of Asgard, and/or as themselves in Max Payne 2, the Alan Wake games, and Control. Vocalist Marko Saaresto, a childhood friend of Sam Lake's, also modeled for Vladimir Lem in Max Payne and for the Shrink in Address Unknown in Max Payne 2.
- Courtney Hope plays a supporting role as time-traveler Beth Wilder in Quantum Break and a lead role as Director Jesse Faden in Control.
- Sean Durrie plays Conspiracy Theorist cab driver Nick Marsters in Quantum Break and Jesse's estranged brother Dylan Faden in Control.
- Shawn Ashmore plays protagonist Jack Joyce in Quantum Break and Sheriff of Bright Falls Tim Breaker in Alan Wake II.
- Lance Reddick played Martin Hatch in Quantum Break and was initially planned to play his Expy Mr. Door in Alan Wake II before he passed away.
- The 'Verse: They officially established the "Remedy Connected Universe" in 2019 with Easter Eggs in Control confirming it takes place in the continuity of Alan Wake. Small connections in the game also retroactively tie their previous works into the universe with the implication they are adjacent universes in the RCU's multiverse.
- Working Title: A few of their productions have used working titles early in development.
