"What Have You Done for Me Lately" was Jackson's first single to break the top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at No. 4; the album itself became her first hit album by topping the Billboard 200. The commercial success of the album and its singles would establish Jackson as a viable music force in her own right after years of sitting in the shadow of her far more famous brother.
The success of the album and its associated singles did much to popularize The Time alums Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis as New Jack Swing producers, with multiple other artists hiring them out to produce their own work in the same style as what they did for Jackson.
The game:
The Cast Showoff: Actor and singer Martti Suosalo, who also plays Ahti the janitor, shows off his vocal talent by singing the Sankarin Tango on Ahti’s radios.
Creator In-Joke: The Watsonian allusion that ties the Floppy Disk object to the Launch power is that said disk contains nuclear launch codes. According to The Art and Making of Control, the Doylist reasoning for this pairing is the Finnish demoscene, from which the game's developer has its roots, where competitions to see how far you can throw a floppy disk are a common tradition.
Dummied Out: The AWE DLC also adds a unique weapon mod for the new Surge form of the Service Weapon, but it cannot be obtained without editing the game. The mod is called "Demolition Dispenser" and it increases the number of explosives the weapon can have out at the same time.
James McCaffrey (Director Zachariah Trench) was the voice of Max Payne, the model for him in Max Payne 3, and the voice of Thomas Zane in Alan Wake.
It also brings back a song from Poets of the Fall after their absence in Quantum Break.
Referenced by...: Borderlands 3's Bounty of Blood DLC features a mission where one can discover a room containing a fridge on a raised platform and a bloodied body in front of it, referencing this game's "Fridge Duty" mission. Fortunately, looking away from the fridge will not kill you.
Matthew Porretta makes a vocal cameo as Alan himself if you find a certain Altered Item, and a more substantial role as Alan in the AWE DLC.
Screwed by the Lawyers: Remedy was intending to include a "Thank You" message in the credits to the community behind the SCP Foundation for inspiration, but was told to scrap it by the legal department.
The game's alpha demo and the 2018 E3 demo revealed that in addition to broad ideas still in progress, Remedy tried out other content was vastly different from the final product:
The E3 demo suggested that the Hiss mooks would spawn in more dynamic ways, such as the sporadic floating corpses dropping down to attack Jesse, or even busting through walls in a surprise attack. In the final product, most mooks simply spawn out of the Hiss' red smoke.
The entire scene with the Benicoff TV and subsequent fight with Lin Salvador was treated as the game's Money-Making Shot, and was thus tweaked a few times, with an alpha version of the establishing cutscene involving the swirling TV instead congealing debris into a more dense, abstract mass. The character of Lin Salvador was also originally named Malcolm Rooney and had unique dialogue, differing from the finished product where only the Hiss' main conduit is able to speak.
The Oceanview Motel went through a series of interesting iterations. Some the earliest versions of the motel featured more outwardly creepy and disturbing elements, such as a raven telling you a riddle or a room with a couch splattered in blood, and Jesse was more talkative and able to use her gun, but these were cut as they clashed too much with the subtler tone they wanted. There were also different puzzles, such as cracking open a safe and holding objects to form shadows in front of a projector.
According to an interview with Matthew Porretta, he was given options on what sort of underwear he wanted Dr. Darling to wear in the video messages where he's lost his mind and taken his clothes off, and one of those options was a bikini. He chose the plain white boxers instead.
From The Art and Making of Control:
Building Shifts were intended to be more integral to the gameplay and exploration, but a lot of them never made it past prototyping as they presented too many complex technical issues. Several ideas were passed to make the Oldest House feel "alive" by manifesting in unpredictable weather, climate, and other aspects of nature. Another semi-preserved idea was that the further away a player was from a Control Point, the chaotic shifting would be more common, which made it into the final cut as Control Points being areas where the Hiss would be purged from infecting the Oldest House.
Design director Stuart Macdonald pitched an idea that the Bottomless Pits of the Firebreaks actually led down to the Foundation of the Oldest House, and that when you're in the Foundation, you could look up and see "slots" in the sky, full of debris that mounted up over the years, such as "keys that had fallen out of people's pockets."
The earliest idea for a threshold merge into the Oldest House was a large office space covered in moss, which was eventually reworked into the Mold Threshold.
Many ideas for Objects of Power were tested: one of the first was a Model Solar System that would be placed in the center of a room and cause it and everything inside to rotate through disproportionate gravitational force. The idea made it past prototyping, but it was cut midway through development as a huge "rotating room" too had its issues, including being nausea-inducing.
Earliest designs of Jesse had her go in more of a punk-inspired direction, with many iterations featuring flashier dyed hair, jean jackets with big, hand-drawn symbols on the back, and a Scarf of Asskicking.
Dylan being bald wasn't decided on until later on, with most of his early concepts showing him with a full head of hair. He was also a lot more aggressive and "Hannibal Lecter-like in tone" to display the Hiss' effects on him, but a lot of this changed when Sean Durrie was cast into the role, who made the character much more subtle and creepy in his own way.
Marshall had the second most iterations after Jesse — originally she was envisioned as "a sort of retro witch", acting as a fantasy-inspired version of a Ranger focusing on ritualistic elements, whose appearance and flashy wardrobe were heavily influenced by Iris Apfel. This fantasy-inspired direction was eventually downplayed, and Marshall became a more of a functional, no-nonsense leader.
Early on, consumable items à la Horizon Zero Dawn and Monster Hunter were tested, but were dropped as they clashed with the desired aggressive, fast-paced tone of the action. Cover mechanics were also more robust, but were scaled down for the same reason, as well as complications from how destructible everything is.
The Service Weapon — brainstormed from the get-go as a shapeshifting weapon — appeared as a lot more mundane and mechanical, with its default form highly resembling a Colt. Among the early alternate forms were a tether gun (which would fire a supernatural chain that linked targets to each other or environmental hazards for damage), and a sword form (which had a kukri-like slant).
The Shape ability was originally implemented in the main game, but it was cut as it meant having to add the necessary crystal blocks to every area in the game and recontextualize them for it. It was brought back in Foundation, and expanded with the Fracture mechanic.
Black Rock was tested to be more of a combat feature, used by Ranger enemies as grenades stuffed with Black Rock powder that would temporarily nuliffy Jesse's psychic powers, including her levitation.
FORMER's original design was much more clustered, organic-looking, and featured two asymmetrical and glowing blue eyes, with its giant limbs and slightly more geometric look being later additions. The boss arena was also originally entirely made of ice.
Ahti's vacation spot was intended to be an explorable area (Jesse would exit through the Foundation only to walk directly into a gorgeous open lakeside vista, with a path leading to Ahti), but was cut as Remedy had no time or production bandwidth to cover it.
The Dimensional Research area was once proposed to be full of ice (implying that Hedron came from a frozen dimension), but was changed to red sand (which was ironically their very first idea; they changed it out of belief that it would be too complicated to render, but it turned out to be a non-issue).
There was a lot of deliberation on how Hedron would be depicted. Early concept arts show it having a very visible eye through its casing (which was eventually dropped as being "too familiar, too knowable, too easy"), and art director Stuart Macdonald proposed that it was some kind of liquid. In the end, they chose to keep its appearance a mystery.
The Apollo 12 lunar lander site present in AWE was an early concept meant for the base game (specifically in the Nostalgia Department) but was scrapped before being refitted in the DLC.
Working Title: Known as "Project 7" or simply "P7" (Jesse's Prime Candidate codenumber) during development. It's also the seventh game Remedy has developed.
on Ahti’s radios.