Sam Lake did not intend for any of this to happen. Thirty years making cult classic video games. Becoming the face of Max Payne. Adopting a new name. “It is all one big fucking detour,” he tells me.
We are on the London Underground, somewhere between Tottenham Court Road and God knows where. It is one of those all-in-one weather days. Freezing in Helsinki at 5am, dropping bags in a muggy Soho at midday, at an East London game convention in the late-afternoon sun. (His forest-green velvet suit may have been a mistake.) Writing books was Lake’s original plan. I ask if he’s ever thought about doing anything else. Before he can answer, we are bustled off at our stop.
As creative director of Finnish studio Remedy Entertainment, Lake produces games that have a notoriously high-concept feel without the big budgets typically attached to cinematic single-player fare à la The Last of Us, Resident Evil and God of War. It has always been precarious – nigh on financially ruinous – to be an independent studio making technically and narratively ambitious games. It still is. This year alone, thousands of layoffs have hit studios such as the formerly impregnable Fortnite powerhouse, Epic. No games – especially not knowingly cerebral titles such as Remedy’s – are guaranteed moneymakers.
The studio has few analogues. One is Polish developer and The Witcher creator, CD Projekt Red – also independent, also cutting edge, also outside the big development hubs of London and San Francisco. But while CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 cost upwards of £290 million to make, Remedy’s 2019 game Control was made with less than ten per cent of that. While Cyberpunk sold many millions more copies, its disastrous launch also required three years of fixes. Control received seven Game Awards nominations, was industry website IGN’s game of the year, and bagged a BAFTA for Finnish actor Martti Suosalo. Suosalo didn’t even know what a BAFTA was when Lake called to tell him the news.
Remedy’s games are reminiscent of Brian Eno’s oft-quoted proclamation about the Velvet Underground: their debut album only sold 30,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band. “I think it’s telling that so many stylistic flourishes from Remedy games have been adopted by other studios, but not quite equalled,” says Xalavier Nelson Jr, director of El Paso, Elsewhere. Nelson Jr’s indie darling paid homage to Remedy’s 2001 breakout hit, Max Payne, just this year. “Remedy works in the same genre and makes each expression of ideas feel new,” he tells me. “It’s the magic of video game development.”
It was the aftermath of Max Payne that led Remedy to Alan Wake. “It was the curse of the second album,” Lake tells me of its troubled road to development: “too much success, too fast.” It took the team two years just to nail the concepts, and a whole seven years passed without a Remedy game at all. When the game finally launched in 2010, Alan Wake told the story of a fictional writer who achieved huge success writing mass-market entertainment, but who wanted to create something deeper and more meaningful instead. It’s not a tricky metaphor to decipher. “He kills off his character. His cash cow,” says Lake. “And then suddenly, he can't write.”
This month, Remedy releases the sequel, Alan Wake 2. By all accounts, it should’ve happened sooner. The original stood askance to an era of hypermasculine, militaristic shooters and was (sort of) celebrated as such, becoming the most pirated game of 2010. Microsoft was hungry for a sequel, and loved Lake’s plan to bring more TV elements into the next game. There were even concepts for Alan Wake 3. But there was one stipulation: Microsoft wanted to buy the franchise rights, just as Take-Two and Rockstar had done years ago for Max Payne. Rather than lose control over Alan Wake, Remedy made Quantum Break: a big-thinking game that debuted to mixed reviews and middling sales on the beleaguered Xbox One.
Even by Remedy’s standards, Wake 2 is its most off-the-wall creation to date: a dual-protagonist supernatural horror, with live action blended with gameplay, custom songs inspired by Lake’s poetry, and cameos from a bizarro back catalogue of characters. “Coming back to it, I felt that there's almost been this kind of a dare,” says Lake as we arrive at Nopi, a laid-back Ottolenghi joint he likes to return to whenever he is in town. “I'm gonna just push this thing as far as I can.”
Half of the game feels like a forgotten season of True Detective – all VHS grime and ram skulls. It sees FBI agent Saga Anderson investigating a series of ritualistic murders in the misty Pacific Northwest. The other half has flavours of Taxi Driver and David Fincher’s Seven. In it, the game’s second lead, author Alan, is lost in a nightmarish version of New York called The Dark Place. “It's a story about reality versus imagined,” says Lake. “About who we believe we are and who we discover we are. Two people and two worlds that feel like opposites, but start to reflect each other.”
Those mirrors, inversions and dualities are everywhere. Light and dark. Up and down. Urban and rural. Man and woman. Wake 2 levels up its storytelling – from twists on classic tropes, such as physical manifestations of a plot board (in Alan’s world) and mind palace (in Saga’s), to live-action segments infused throughout. Its story is also supremely malleable: play whichever character you want, and the game will reshape itself until you reach its finale. “We have tried to be ambitious and move games as a medium forward in basically all aspects,” says codirector Kyle Rowley. “Not just one or two elements, but everything.”
Lake not only wrote and directed the game, but acted in it too. He plays Alex Casey, who is Anderson’s FBI partner and an identical lookalike for the cash-cow protagonist of Wake’s bestsellers. Casey is voiced by James McCaffrey, who voiced Max Payne, whom Lake also provided the likeness for. If this all sounds incredibly dense, unwieldy and a bit pretentious, it’s because it is. Lake is obsessed with meta structures in his games, creating a self-referential mythos called the Remedy Connected Universe.
“Maybe somebody else would have gone like, ‘OK, actually, I won’t do this role,’” Lake says, when I ask if acting was sensible on top of everything else he had to commit to on this project. “But I was like, ‘I want to do this. I'm gonna do this, no matter what it takes.’”
It’s time-consuming to make games in any capacity. Anyone who does it will tell you the extreme collaboration and commitment they require. “No matter how much work he has on him, how much everything can seem to be on fire, he is always calm and collected under immense pressure,” Rowley told me. But Lake’s unorthodox level of doing has stretched him “really thin” for what he feels is the longest time. He will take a sabbatical in the Spring, after the release of the game’s first expansion. He is already looking forward to his mountain of unread books. When he returns, the studio will work out how to take the pressure off.
“I'm sure there are different viewpoints,” Lake says. “Even if they’re, ‘You are just fucking insane.’”
A lot of people don’t know this, but Sam Lake is an illusion. The 53-year-old, whose real name is Sami Järvi (Finnish for lake), rebranded many years ago.
Partly due to inconvenience: “Finnish names are hard to pronounce and hard to spell.”
Partly due to insecurity: he was always fearful that his Finnish name would undermine the reception of his English-language writing.
Partly for confidence: “Playing a role is liberating. You are pretending.”
Sami Järvi could not have taken the stage in front of 400 people at EGX – the gaming convention where we spend our afternoon. One fan half-bowed when reaching the front of the queue to ask Lake questions. Another had a Remedy tattoo. At the end, Lake posed for a photo in front of the full house with a smirk and a raised eyebrow. When he rejoins me backstage, he begins overthinking. Should he get a tattoo? What tattoo? A plant would be his most likely choice. But what style? Whereabouts? His younger brother is a botanical artist back in Finland. Perhaps one of his brother’s pieces? He decides that he can’t decide.
A chronic worrier, Lake is almost always turning things over in his head: “OK, but what if this goes wrong?” His trick is to try to turn that burden into productivity, but dabbling is his lifelong talent. There was the piano, which “never really went anywhere”. There was tap dancing, before he got “The Fear” after a few lessons. Fencing? Forget about it. Finland’s national service did help with his self-discipline – although he did try (and fail) to use his allergies to get out of it – but he never fully reformed into a natural starter-finisher. Writing is his only real constant.
I ask how he deals with being an extrovert tackling repression. He sees himself differently. “An introvert struggling with how to be present,” he says. His pen name lets him distance half a step. “It’s kind of like ‘Well, Sam Lake, whatever’.” The mirage is helped by his unusual, striking face – high cheekbones and long marionette lines that give him razor-sharp edges. Eyes that he can widen beyond the normal range. A casting director’s dream character.
He likens his early years of becoming the public face of Remedy, and the literal face of Max Payne, to a bungee jump: “You are stood at the edge and your body is telling you, ‘Don’t do it you fucking idiot!’” It was on a flight to Barcelona to present a game, relatively early in his career, that he realised, “I was not feeling nervous anymore. I could do this.”
The Lake mythology has only deepened since. A TikTok account of him drinking coffee in places around the world. Bespoke suits. (Most are from his favourite tailor in Helsinki, Sauma.) Sami Järvi would not be wearing tailored suits. “Back in the late ’90s, the game industry seemed to be swords and T-shirts,” he says. “Like, ‘Fuck those suit guys.’”
But as Lake? “This is my one-man effort to change things.”
Lake may have chosen to be defined by his own alter-ego character, but he never expected to be waylaid with another. The story of how Lake became the face of Max Payne, one of the most iconic video game characters in history, goes something like this…
It was the early 1990s. Sami Järvi was a member of the Helsinki University Roleplaying Association. A kid obsessed with fantasy books and tabletop games, he gravitated to the only self-selecting cabal he shared a kinship with: other nerds obsessed with fantasy books and tabletop games. It’s a clan – including Remedy cofounder, Petri Järvilehto – that still plays together today, although Lake has excluded himself from their D&D WhatsApp group while finalising Alan Wake 2.
One afternoon, they all found themselves in a cyberpunk photoshoot for the cover of the association’s magazine. “We were being like, ‘These fantasy worlds are so cool, so I’m posing with a sword,’” Lake says. He wore an ill-fitted suit. Wielded a vacuum cleaner tube. Petri, who was proficient with Photoshop, edited it into a robotic appendage. Several years later, that photo would eventually become the perfect foundation for the comic-book panels that visualised Max Payne’s story. “We were going to E3, and they were saying these really flattering things. ‘Oh, he looks like Clint Eastwood! He looks like Bruce Willis!’” says Lake.
You get the sense that he half regrets it: “If I had known how big the whole thing would become, would I have done it?” He takes a minute. “I don’t know, but it would certainly have given me pause.” Lake has not, for example, decided whether his likeness will return for the recently announced remakes. But that group of lifelong friends was key to his artistic self-discovery.
Following the unambiguous success of Control, Lake is more comfortable with who he is than any time in his career. He laughs at the idea of the character of Wake being autobiographical. “Usually people think about a too-simple perspective like, ‘Oh, you just wanted to write yourself,’” he says. “That’s too naive.”
Each character is a little piece of Sami Järvi. This one thinks about this part of life the same way. That one has the same neuroses. This one is confident in social situations, how he’d love to be. The character of Ahti – who first appeared as a paranormal janitor in Control and returns in Wake 2 – was a turning point for Lake in writing about his native culture: “To me he is a comical archetype of a certain kind of a Finnish man,” he says. “I have a thick accent; I'm very aware of it. There is a certain sense of comedy to it, and I wanted to use that.”
If anything, the great miracle of Remedy’s games is their ability to separate concepts from chaos. “It’s not easy to get across a vision for something you have had in your head for so long,” Rowley says. “When you know all the details, but you want to give room for people to explore their own ideas.”
So rather than solely relying on one medium for Alan Wake 2’s beautifully shot story, the team opted to blend cutscenes with film. It’s something they've done before, including in the original, but now Remedy has blurred the lines closer than ever. Storied actors like David Harewood (Homeland, The Night Manager) and big Finnish stars like Peter Franzén (Vikings) show up in key roles. It’s a smart way of balancing overflowing creativity with limited resources; live action is, minute for minute, far cheaper than traditional alternatives. But it’s also more fraught with risk, in terms of both pulling players out of one art form into another and making sure Wake 2’s story can stand up to the added scrutiny of a meta mixed-media experiment. In a year in which Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space both received adored remakes, Lake is confident Remedy can go toe-to-toe with the survival-horror greats. “They’re going to be like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’”
We are back on the streets of Soho now. It is getting late. The weather has turned again – a half-rain that doesn’t quite justify a cab. “So back to your question,” he says, hours after I asked it. “‘Would I ever do anything else?’ Yeah. I'm still thinking that I will.” He looks at his phone for directions back to his hotel, but has no data. “There will be a time when I retire. It's just that… this has all been so engaging.” There are other stories he has always wanted to tell: “One was this crazy, huge budget, dark gothic fantasy, which I haven’t used for anything yet...”
I suggest accompanying him back in the right direction. You might go missing.
“Aha!” he says, waving my worry away. “It’ll make a great story.”
