Words by Owen Danoff

Finnish composer Petri Alanko had his first phone call with Remedy Entertainment in August of 2004 about a project he would later learn was called Alan Wake.

While the game garnered stellar reviews when it hit shelves in 2010, its unique concept and smart narrative were no match for the same-day release of Rockstar Games’ long-delayed and heavily anticipated new IP Red Dead Redemption, ultimately causing publisher Microsoft to lose faith in a full-on sequel. Though Alanko had begun writing music for Alan Wake 2 as early as 2011, the game became trapped in its very own Dark Place as Remedy moved on to other projects. 

But Alanko and Remedy creative director Sam Lake didn’t move on for good. In 2012, Alan Wake’s American Nightmare was released as a “side-quel” of the first game, and Remedy’s 2016 game Quantum Break had its roots in an attempt at a proper Alan Wake 2. After a 2017 break with Microsoft, Remedy went all-in on Wake, going as far as to use their next game, Control, to officially set up the “Remedy Connected Universe” through full-on Alan Wake downloadable content (DLC). Armed with that knowledge, Alanko began compiling his own rules for the sonic palette of a now-interconnected universe.

For a composer who is admittedly loath to do the same thing twice, the expanding world of the Remedy Connected Universe necessitates just as much invention as it does repetition. With Alan Wake 2, Alanko drew conceptual gold from characters and locations, speaking with physicist friends about how audio modulates in underwater environments (inspired by the Dark Place) and sampling Remedy’s newest toys—the monstrous Mega Marvin and Apprehension Engine, each of which he calls “beyond an instrument.”

Alanko’s, and Remedy’s, work paid off. The musical score has been nominated for Best Score and Music at The Game Awards, Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition at The Dice Awards, and a nomination for ‘Music’ at the upcoming BAFTA Game Awards. And with Alan Wake 2 DLC confirmed and on the way, nobody shows any signs of slowing down.

Would you mind giving a brief history of your partnership with Remedy?

Petri Alanko: In August, it will be 20 years. It was the 15th or 16th of August when I first got a phone call from them, that they would need some modern orchestral music for one of their upcoming IPs, which happened to be Alan Wake—they didn’t tell me the name then—and asked if I wanted to come and see a demo video. I went there and was basically staring in awe at the screen, thinking, “Holy shit. I need to do this.”

I saw the picture and I heard music in my head. I had to write something down right away, but I couldn't do it right there. After the meeting, I went to my car to drive back home, and I had to stop. I stopped the car right by the road and wrote something in my notebook. I can't even remember how I got back home because I was so full of melodies and harmonies. They had given me a week to finalize the demo, but I put so much effort into it that two or three days later, I had already sent them what I had done. I got an okay from them: “We liked what you did and would like to discuss some more.” Then, I learned that it was going to be called Alan Wake. 

It started from there. Funny enough, the track that I did for Remedy in August 2004 never found its place in Alan Wake because we had to cut a few levels from the original game. It was shelved, and then we all forgot it. I tried to put it in Alan Wake's American Nightmare, but it couldn't fit in there. There was an Alan Wake teaser in Control. I tried to put it in there—it couldn't fit in. Then, one cinematic appeared on my desk, which happened to be from towards the end of Alan Wake 2. In that cinematic, Alan had found himself again after his internal struggle with Mr. Scratch, and Scratch had escaped. Alan was alone, and he decided that he had to do something.

It was a driving sequence from somewhere to Bright Falls, and there was Alan's monologue on top of it. From the tone of his voice and the facial capture, it was like, “Wait a minute. This sort of feels like something might fit in here.” I rushed through my folders, loaded the original 2004 piece into Logic, and I pressed play.

When I realized that my Alan Wake notes appeared just when Alan Wake stands out of his car and walks towards the static wall through which he has to enter Bright Falls, it was quite an emotional moment. I realized, “It had to be this. It has to be this one where we are using that particular theme." I had to correct a few things in the orchestration. I had used some almost medieval orchestration there, and I replaced everything with Spitfire's Chamber Strings and added some woodwinds as well. It felt like magic after 19 years.

When you start a new game, what are your first steps? Themes, sonic palette, just thinking about the story?

I'm going through the story a lot, and I'm trying to have discussions with the game directors and writers. I’m asking very stupid questions and sometimes they probably need to fabricate the answer right there. I want to know the background.

“Why is this? Why is that? What is happening here? What is this place? Why is this important?” I need to know everything. I need to build whole pictures in my head about the protagonists, the antagonists, and the environment. Slowly, it comes together. And it’s all real in my head. That sounds funny, but that's how I work. I need to have that world in my head in order to be able to fill it with sounds. After I’ve gathered the world together, I start thinking about possible sounds—a sonic world.

Especially if there is a battle between good and bad, that's something that I really want to dig deep into in order to find the contradiction. Everybody is not absolutely good or absolutely bad—there's little bit of both in everybody. I'm concentrating on the gray areas of the characters or locations first. How that gray area turns to white or black—that's what defines the importance or the polarity of the role, the character, or the place. 

I never like to do the same thing twice. Well, now I have done the same thing twice because Alan Wake and Alan Wake 2 are close siblings, thematically. Their instrumentation and orchestration can be partially similar, although there are many, many differences in Alan Wake 2.

What were some of your earliest creative decisions?

That’s something that I defined very early on: we need to have something profound for Alan's surroundings. Back in Alan Wake, he ended up in the Dark Place. He dove down a cliff to get there, so one would think it's basically underwater. I wanted to play with the idea that every instrument would sound not through air but through water, or something that resembles liquid.

Since I have some theoretical physics background—I studied theoretical physics at university very long ago—I started playing with the idea. I called a few friends of mine that are still very deep in physics, and we exchanged some ideas of the materials, like how they would behave. Especially materials that would fluctuate so that the audible effects wouldn’t be constant. Instead, they would be modulating.

I started recording broken drum symbols, all kinds of metal plates, and even a few Rimowa suitcases. And an old piano got destroyed. I gathered a raw library, started building instrument sets, and tried to turn them into something usable. As I was doing that, I’d notice, “Hey, I'm building a melody in my head.” That melody would appear every time a certain character was on my screen, or some location appeared. It was easy like that.

One thing led to another, and I made a huge set of Kontakt instruments. I also made a few Native Instruments Reaktor instruments as well. I don't know the exact amount of recorded material for Alan Wake 2, but it has to be hundreds of gigabytes. 

Remedy, at some point, acquired a Mega Marvin and Apprehension Engine, and those were interesting pieces of equipment because how they produce sound is beyond an instrument. It's not meant to be beautiful. It's not meant to be harmonic or tonal. They are just creating noise, but they create noise in such an interesting way that, when you record that and turn that into an instrument, it immediately becomes very accessible and kind of lovable, even, despite the fact that it's rude and it's loud and it's nasty.

The same happens with Beauty and the Beast. In Alan and Saga's world, the Beauty is the orchestral instruments and the Beast is the Apprehension Engine and Mega Marvin. Apprehension Engine is basically wooden, and Mega Marvin is made of metal, so it’s the best of both worlds. I spent hours and hours recording those.

The funny thing is that I've never been part of a project where something that I suggested in a demo is too little. They wanted more horror. They wanted more pressure. They wanted more action. They wanted the gamer to feel underpowered and little. It was quite the ride, to say the least.

We have the Remedy Game Universe now. Do you approach music differently, knowing you’re weaving a larger tapestry?

I do, yes. Luckily, I feel I have taken part in laying the foundations of RCU (Remedy Connected Universe) music and audio with certain choices and weightings—for instance, “something being so evil it has a gravity and affects the overtones”—as well as their orchestrations and template design. Each product will definitely have its own instrumentation and palette, but there are similarities in the palette, and the amount of layers that hide all that are… well, numerous. 

I want to have something in there that someone notices after, say, the 40th time—or maybe 100th time—when listening to something I’ve done. It doesn’t restrict—it allows more. I’d refer to it as dictating the rules, but the sandbox is still rather vast despite the ruleset.

Since we want to keep the “small human being” in the center, the string sections, for example, are leaning towards a smaller size—say, chamber strings. This is due to the fact that too many players end up blending into each other, and the sound of one player playing with distinctive others is much closer to humanity than, say, 600 first violins in unison—then, it’s no longer a group of humans. It’s a blob organism—an amoeba. 

The same applies to woodwinds and brass, with the only exception being low brass. Also, the lowest strings have a sine wave tied to their envelope, adding some oomph to the sound. Percussion should be much closer to the listener and maybe a tad burnt or saturated. If a piano is smacked hard, it’s only the lowest two octaves. Outside that, it’s very lightly, almost feather lightly played, and I tend to use a lot of compression as well as reverb or ambience. I’m planning to write a style book of these choices, but that can wait.

Remedy games are known for having incredible musical moments—the Old Gods of Asgard concert in AW1, Control’s Ashtray Maze, and AWII’s “We Sing” chapter. How involved are you with those, and what does it take to put one of those together?

Well, unfortunately I wasn’t involved with the integration with Alan Wake 2, and in the original game, it was one of those last-minute ideas--I guess I was already on my vacation by then. I do know, however, that the painstaking piece-by-piece puzzle preparation was a sheer nightmare challenge for the sound design team, but in each case they really showed their expertise. Just to have a certain song flow naturally with the gameplay is a form of art in itself. I take my hat off.

Game director Sam Lake seems like he is very musically inclined. What is your back and forth like at this point in your collaboration? 

I remember when we first discussed Alan Wake's sequel in 2011. The game had just come out and I had already started writing something that I thought would happen. I laid down the ideas and made the orchestrations pretty much ready so that, in case it happened, I would immediately have something to use. 

Of course, we happened to release Alan Wake one exactly at the same time as Red Dead Redemption, which isn't exactly the best idea. But of course, you don't have any idea. You select the marketing slot and everything, and then you just hope, “Please don't let there be Grand Theft Auto, or something like that.” Okay, it wasn't GTA, but it was RDR.

We took some beating about that, but it happened that people liked our little game, and it gathered a cult following through the years. A growing crowd started questioning, “When will there be a sequel? When are you releasing Alan Wake 2?” It repeated and repeated and there were quite a few manuscripts and ideas along the way, but it seemed that the markets or the publishers weren’t ready. There were a few very close calls along the way. 

Every time I knew that they were preparing something, of course, I saw the presentation. I composed something and built something and then we’d get the, “Sorry, guys, it's not time yet.” Then, one day, I was sitting in the Remedy cafeteria having a cup of coffee, and Sam went by. He sort of winked an eye at me and I knew immediately, “Okay, now it's going to happen.” I stood up, headed home, and went through all my backups, my USB sticks, my cloud services, everything. I gathered everything I had done into one place on my working disk. And I started preparing.

We had a lot of talks. He discussed his ideas, and there are a few things that couldn't happen in the final game, for which I am truly sorry. I don't know if we are able to do anything like that in a DLC package, for instance, but maybe one day or in Alan Wake 3. But a lot of really great ideas were left out, and there were already quite a few really good ideas in Alan Wake 2, so you can imagine what it could be. Lots of coffee was drank during the conversations, I have to say. Enormous amounts.

I like to listen to his stories. It’s like you gather around the fireplace and there is some wood burning, and you may have something that you grill there—sausage, steak, carrot, or whatnot—and you listen to stories that other people tell, and you get almost hypnotized. You look at the flames, you listen to the story, your mind starts to wander, and you go into this place that is Bright Falls, Cauldron Lake… or the Dark Place.