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Creator / Remedy Entertainment

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"Sam Lake, please do the face!"

Remedy Entertainment is a Video Game studio based in Espoo, Finland. Founded in 1995 by demoscene members from groups such as Future Crew, it is one of Finland's oldest operating video game studios. Remedy is known for its cinematic, heavily story-driven games, fast-paced action gameplay, pushing the boundaries of computer graphics, mind-bending narratives with film, TV, and literary influences, and Medium Blending, particularly Live Action Cutscenes.

In 1996, 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, which became known for its film noir influences and for popularizing bullet time in video games, and at the time was Finland's highest grossing video game. Remedy sold all the rights to Max Payne in 2002 to Take-Two Interactive for US$10 million and 969,932 shares of stock in exchange for developing the sequel, Max Payne 2, which was released the following year. This would be Remedy's last new Max Payne game, as Rockstar continued developing the franchise on its own. Max Payne was also the first Finnish game IP to receive a Hollywood film adaptation.

In 2005, Remedy partnered with Microsoft to publish Alan Wake in 2010, its Gaiden Game follow-up Alan Wake's American Nightmare in 2012, and later Quantum Break in 2016, the latter of which was the largest production in the history of the Finnish video game industry at the time. During the development of Quantum Break, the CEO of Remedy, Matias Myllyrinne, departed from the company and was replaced with Tero Virtala, who would help Remedy transition into a multi-project studio and work on multiple projects at once. In 2017, Remedy went public on the Nordic stock exchange and 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, and the second being published by 505 Games, which was revealed at E3 2018 to be Control. Shortly before Control's release in August 2019, Remedy acquired the publishing rights to the Alan Wake IP from Microsoft and partnered with Epic Games to release a remaster of the first game on all major platforms in 2021, and paved the way for a proper sequel, 2023's Alan Wake II, which would turn out to be one of the most expensive cultural products ever in the history of Finland.

Remedy is close friends with fellow Finnish game developer Housemarque, which was founded within months of Remedy, and the two studios regularly compliment and praise each other's work on social media.

Games developed:

Upcoming Projects:

  • Max Payne 1 + 2 Remake (TBA) note : A full remake of the first two Max Payne games in Alan Wake II's Northlight engine that is planned to combine both games' storylines into a single continuous experience.
  • Project Condor (TBA): A multiplayer Gaiden Game set in the Oldest House from Control.
  • Control 2 (TBA): A direct sequel to 2019's Control.

Cancelled Projects:

  • Kestrel (formerly known as Vanguard): A live-service co-op game and new IP that was to be a co-production with Tencent Games.

Tropes used in Remedy games:

  • Actor-Inspired Element: Remedy likes to involve its lead actors early in the process specifically so that they can brainstorm and contribute to the development of their character's personality, appearance, and motivations. In some cases, the script is specifically left incomplete in places to allow it to be filled in with actor contributions.
  • 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 "Nordicized" 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. Remedy is also well-known for its use 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. Perhaps owing to their demoscene heritage, a subculture all about squeezing as much graphical performance out of computers as possible, pretty much all of their games have pushed the boundaries of computer graphics and require beefy computer hardware to run properly at the time of their release.
  • 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 with professional actors 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. His acting even got him a BAFTA nomination.
      • 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:
  • 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 graphics 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, which was not a common practice for video games back in the late nineties. In later games, this practice even extends to background NPCs and allows developers to include the likenesses of their family and friends in the games. This usage of digital doubles 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 Creator Thumbprint. 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. According to the comics, 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 never knew his father and 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 estranged herself from her own 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:
  • 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.

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