Stephen King gifted Alan Wake's opening quote to Remedy for just $1
Famed writer Stephen King granted Remedy the rights to use his infamous quote that opens the original Alan Wake for the nominal sum of just $1.
Alan Wake memorably begins with a voiceover from the game's main character quoting King in a description of what nightmares really mean.
Speaking to Eurogamer, Remedy boss Sam Lake revealed he had «really, really, desperately wanted» to be able to open the game with a quote from King himself — whose style matches much of the spooky supernatural horror that follows.
Luckily, King was on board with the idea too.
«Creating the original Alan Wake, I really, really desperately wanted a quote from him to start it off,» Lake told Eurogamer's Chris Tapsell in an interview this month at Summer Game Fest. «It's my understanding he wanted $1 for us to get the rights to use it. [It was] so very generous.»
Lake was speaking ahead of his appearance at Tribeca Festival where he discussed the horror genre — somewhere King has also appeared for similar conversations.
«Obviously he has done a lot of that,» Lake continued. «So I'm sure we will be talking about Stephen King influences in [Alan Wake], among other things.»
Alan Wake and its sequel feature numerous nods to King throughout — alongside other influences such as the works of HP Lovecraft, and the TV shows Twin Peaks and The Twilight Zone.
The first game begins with a sequence where we see Alan Wake driving through the lonely countryside, over which we hear him deliver the following lines:
«Stephen King once wrote that 'Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there's little fun to be had in explanations; they're antithetical to the poetry of fear.'
»In a horror story, the victim keeps asking 'why?' But there can be no explanation, and there
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