Studio Profile
From Max Payne to Control: how one studio stayed true to its obsessions for 25 years
From Max Payne to Control, how Remedy has stayed true to its obsessions for 25 years
The version of Remedy Entertainment that exists today is – as you’d expect – totally unrecognisable from the studio that was founded 25 years ago. Today, its Espoo office houses hundreds of employees, juggling four projects and partnerships with Microsoft and Epic. Back in 1995, it was half a dozen Finnish kids who’d come together in the demoscene, working out of a parent’s basement and gradually taking over the entire house. For everything that has changed over the years, though, it’s easy to see the line that connects Remedy’s earliest games to the ones it’s working on today.
But, we ask CTO and co-founder Markus Mäki, is that how it feels when you’re looking back over the last quarter-century of your own life? “There’s definitely not a straight line,” he says. “I don’t think there can be, in a business that changes this quickly – and we were all so young when we started the company.” Mäki was there at the beginning, as part of Future Crew. Its demos combined boundary-pushing graphics with techno music created using the team’s own tools. The technology is ancient, hacked together on early PCs, but the audio-visual experiences it created, such as Second Reality, remain striking today.
“We knew we had some talent,” Mäki says. “Everybody was in their early 20s thinking, ‘What are we going to grow up to be, and what are we going to do with our lives?’” They decided to move into game development, founding a company on August 15, 1995. Mäki is the only one of the six still at the company – some of his fellow founders stuck around and continued to guide the course of Remedy’s development for years afterwards, while others quickly realised it wasn’t for them. “I don’t think the company paid salaries for the first couple of years or so,” he says. “But we were all young, passionate guys. I think we still are passionate. We’re just not young anymore.”
The studio found a partner in 3D Realms, which liked Remedy’s pitch for HiSpeed – a racer that, with the Danish publisher’s guidance, became Death Rally. This was a vehicular combat game, but Remedy had “multiple small teams working on early prototypes”, according to Mäki, and its first game could have just as easily been an RTS, an RPG or a space simulation game. In that context, it makes more sense that Remedy’s next game took a leap into a totally different genre, one that would come to define Remedy for the next two decades.
This project – known then as ‘Dark Justice’ – was again picked out of the lineup by 3D Realms. Turning the idea into a game took almost five years, something that would become a pattern for the studio, but it was time well spent, given both the game’s success and the foundations it laid for Remedy. Max Payne arrived in 2001, a stylish thirdperson shooter with a Matrix-style bullet-time gimmick, a script dripping with purple prose and a hero whose features were literally photorealistic.
The man responsible for those last two is
Sam Lake, a childhood friend of co-founder Petri Järvilehto, who’d joined Remedy as a writer in the Death Race days. To this new project he brought a love of film noir, spotting the connections between
“[MAX PAYNE] IS THE TEMPLATE AND THE INITIAL INCARNATION OF WHAT THESE DAYS IS SEEN AS A REMEDY GAME”
that genre and the Hong Kong action movies which inspired Max Payne’s slow-motion shootouts. He also lent his face, turning a photo of that nowiconic grimace (Lake treats us to one over the Zoom call) into a texture wrapped around Payne’s head.
If you were drawing that line through Remedy’s history, Max Payne is likely the starting point you’d pick. “It’s fair to say that it is the template and the initial incarnation of what these days is seen as a Remedy game,” Lake says. “Obviously we are always trying out new things and want to challenge ourselves – but at the same time, it’s all a logical continuation from Max Payne in many ways.”
The game introduced a number of common traits you can trace through pretty much everything the studio has made since. Asked what he thinks those traits are, Lake begins with “cinematic action,” in tandem with giving the player the power to manipulate time, gravity or some other fundamental force of physics. He adds to the list “charactercentric, story-focused… those are especially close to my heart”, hence the studio’s love of the thirdperson camera – “because the character is at the centre, it’s good to be able to see them”.
“There’s also the setting, the visual side of it,” Mäki adds. “What we do is, we create a world.” Those settings generally take the present-day real world as their starting point, with its chosen genre (fantasy, crime, science fiction) layered on top to, as Lake puts it, “disrupt the normalcy of that world.” There’s also the pop-culture connection. “We are fans of many things,” Lake says, and he’s not wrong. From David Lynch to John Woo, Rod Serling to Stephen King, Remedy has never been afraid to wear its influences on its sleeve.
In the years after making Max Payne, another name was almost added to that list: Terry Pratchett.
“I had around ten story concepts that we just moved through and explored, some of them for a couple of months and some just a couple of weeks,” Lake says. One involved a zombie apocalypse; another, superpowers, something seen in Remedy’s more recent games. “One concept was about small-town supernatural horror, and I would say that that was even more Stephen King-inspired than Alan Wake,” Lake says.
It’s not difficult to imagine any of these ideas done in the Remedy style. But something akin to Pratchett’s Discworld novels? “This is the pendulum swing that you get,” Lake says. “You work on something for a long time, and when you get to the next project, it initially feels like you need to go quite far away from that. So, from hard-boiled New York film noir, the pendulum swing goes to… it’s a fantasy game with a lot of humour.” Alas, its swordplay combat prototypes never quite clicked and the team moved on. “Usually the reality is that the pendulum does swing back,” Lake says.
Remedy had the room to experiment and find what its next game would be – a process that