Part game, part show, Remedy’s bold storytelling experiment is unlike anything you’ve ever played
For more than 20 years, Remedy Entertainment has developed story-focused action games like Max Payne and Alan Wake – while working at the leisurely pace of a bullet-time shootout. In the span of two decades, Remedy has created five titles. Contrast that with other high-profile studios like Naughty Dog or Gearbox, who have both worked on more than a dozen games in that same period, and Remedy’s gameography feels a little thin.
Remedy knows how to take its time, so it’s fitting that its newest title explores the action that takes place inside a series of frozen moments. Quantum Break’s standout feature is an experimental narrative that tells its story through both interactive gameplay and live-action drama. This blended experiment is one of the most complex projects in video game history. Quantum Break is a gamble, but then, Remedy’s entire history has been one long series of big bets.
A REMEDY FOR BOREDOM
In the mid ‘90s, high-profile game development was localized primarily to Japan and the U.S. But that didn’t stop a group of 10 self-taught programmers from Espoo, Finland, from thinking they had the chops to compete in the big leagues. For a little over a year, this team of high-school hackers and college dropouts worked out of their parents’ basements on a car-combat racing game called Death Rally. Inspired by games like Twisted Metal, this simple top-down racer equipped players with chain guns, bumper spikes, and land mines as they competed in a series of cutthroat races through an apocalyptic wasteland.
Almost on a whim, one of these programmers reached out to a childhood friend named Sam Lake, asking him if he’d like to help write a few character bios for the game. Lake was studying the English language and literature at The University of Helsinki in hopes of someday becoming a writer. A fan of pen and paper role-playing games, Lake had already written several of his own RPG campaigns. Writing a video game didn’t seem like it would be much different to him.
“Writing for games really wasn’t a plan,” says Lake, who is now Remedy’s creative director. “Back then, the concept of being a writer in video games wasn’t really a thing. I was like, ‘Is that even possible?’ The royalty percentages were divided up among the team, and my friend was kind enough to give me a couple of percentages from his portion.”
After Death Rally released on PC in 1996, this small team of developers – now calling itself Remedy – began working on a top-down shooter set in a futuristic drug-gang world. Originally called Dark Justice, the game went through a series of rapid changes and eventually turned into the project that put Remedy on the map.
“We changed the game to present day and made it a third-person action game,” Lake says. “I wanted a kind of the filmnoir, hard-boiled feeling to it, and I wanted to bring a private eye-type main character into it. Maybe he’s a cop. Maybe he’s a DA cop and there’s a problem with this new drug on the streets. And so, step by step, Dark Justice became Max Payne.”
Fans and critics alike loved Max Payne’s slow-motion bullet-time action, which eventually spawned sequels, a movie, and a series of imitators. But in hindsight, one of the most peculiar aspects of Max Payne was a series of fake shows that Remedy created for TVs scattered throughout the environments. These shows were parodies of crime dramas and Victorian-era soap operas, but they often featured nuggets of moral truths and even paralleled the events of the game itself. Lake was intrigued by this exploration of television storytelling inside a video game, and the developer would return to this concept over and over again. Years later, this blending of the two mediums pushed Remedy into one of the wildest experiments in its 20-year history.
HITTING THE BIG TIME
Many independent studios dream of having a successful property it can iterate on as it builds a reliable fan base. When Max Payne released to massive critical acclaim and sold over four million copies worldwide, Remedy had created that kind of bankable property. However, the team wasn’t content to be known as the Max Payne studio, so it made a bold gamble, selling its ownership of the Max Payne license to Rockstar Games. Remedy stuck around to make Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, but then the company took its windfall and set out on a seven-year journey that led to the creation of Alan Wake.
Remedy’s psychological thriller was another opportunity for the company to experiment with the television format. Not only were several new television parodies scattered throughout Alan Wake’s world, but the game itself was structured like a television show, complete with story recaps.
While the team finalized the concepts for Alan Wake, Lake kept dreaming up new ideas for future projects. He remembers furiously scribbling out a paragraph of an idea for a time-travel epic based on the real physics of quantum mechanics. He titled this concept Quantum and shoved it into a drawer for safekeeping.
Throughout Alan Wake’s development, the concept of playing around with quantum mechanics continued to resurface, as though Lake couldn’t escape its pull. “There was a time during the development of Alan Wake that it was a bit more sci-fi oriented, and was more about quantum physics,” Lake says. “We even built a particle collider as a world prop at one point. The development was a long journey, and I’m happy we didn’t end up going the sci-fi route, but those concepts were kind of the seeds of Quantum Break.”
As Remedy neared the end of Alan Wake’s development, the team worked up a prototype for Alan Wake 2 and pitched the idea to Microsoft, but the publisher didn’t bite. At the time, Microsoft was preparing its rollout for the Xbox One, and it hoped that original television programming would be a central component of its new console experience. Remedy, with its years of experience making games that parodied – and even modeled – television shows, seemed like a logical partner.
Microsoft encouraged the studio to pitch a new IP that explored the concepts of interactive narrative and original television programming. Lake dusted off his old concept for Quantum, and the studio drafted a game pitch about a couple of scientists who survived a failed science experiment only to discover they had superhero-like time-manipulation powers. Microsoft loved the concept, but it wanted the team to announce the project at the same time as the console unveiling, which didn’t give Remedy much time to actually create a game.
“There is a tendency to say, ‘Oh, it’s not ready, I’m not showing this yet,’” Lake says. “But then again, there are many good reasons to show it. The earlier you expose it to people, the more you get feedback and you understand what works and what doesn’t work, and you have plenty of time to react. But also just from a marketing and PR perspective, it’s important to make people aware that this is something we are making and communicate why we think it’s going to be pretty cool.”
When Remedy debuted Quantum Break during the Xbox One reveal event in May 2013, the studio hadn’t even cast actors for the lead roles, let alone begun principal photography for the live-action show. Instead, it cooked up a oneoff gameplay sequence starring actor Sean Durrie. Remedy knew it would likely have to recast its main protagonist for the final game (though Durrie does appear in the game as an NPC), but Microsoft’s offer to show Quantum Break during one of the most watched press events outside of E3 was too good to pass up.
“It’s been a long project, and as these things go, they evolve,” Lake says. “I feel that the heart and soul of Quantum Break is very much what we started out with, but many elements evolved and changed along the way. Looking back, the focus for Microsoft was very much on TV stuff, and they actually made a prototype episode, which was something like 10 minutes long, as a kind of proof case. The materials shown at the reveal were from that, but in many ways it had nothing to do with the actual show we have now. The story back then was completely different.”
Quantum Break was originally scheduled for release sometime in 2014, but Microsoft’s rollout of its new console wasn’t as smooth as the publisher had hoped. Within a year Microsoft had scaled back its ambitious plans for original TV content, which left Remedy’s new game as something like a weird side project. Quantum Break blew past its initial release because Remedy still had to figure out how to integrate a show together with a game. The whole project was beginning to feel like a long shot.
NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOW BUSINESS
As early as 2001, Remedy attracted the attention of Collision Entertainment, which optioned the rights to produce a live-action film adaptation of Max Payne. The movie tumbled through a series of production companies and had a number of false starts before Mark Wahlberg was cast as the lead and Max Payne finally hit theaters in 2008. The film’s reviews were far from positive, and Remedy wasn’t happy with the experience, but the journey was an important learning experience for the company. Remedy felt like it had bet on Hollywood, and Hollywood had let it down. If Remedy ever had the opportunity to adapt another property to a different medium, it wanted more creative control.
Remedy kept the Max Payne film in mind as it began working with Microsoft on the Quantum Break show. Early on, there were several questions about how a game and a show could even tell one story. Would people watch the show first or play the game first? How many episodes of the show would they make? Would the game and the show even be sold together as one package?
Remedy convinced everyone involved that the two projects should be one product. Not only would they be sold together on one disc, they would be woven together to tell a single story. Players would play the game for a few hours and then watch one episode of the show before playing another section of the game, and so on. To help sell the feel of the show, each episode would be approximately 22 minutes, which is equivalent to a 30-minute television show without commercial breaks. Moreover, the game and the show would play off each other. While the show helped set up events that took place in the next set of game levels, players’ choices in the game would affect the events that played out in the show.
“I was always pushing for, ‘Let’s bring them closer together,’” Lake says. “I felt like that would be the new thing and that would be somehow different and more ambitious, but also harder to make.”
This unique narrative structure was indeed harder for people to wrap their minds around. In the late-‘90s a few games – such as Night Trap and Phantasmagoria – had tried to integrate full-motion video into gameplay, but no one had ever attempted a game/show hybrid of this scale before. Microsoft contracted the production company Lifeboat to produce the show itself. Lifeboat was a relatively new company that had worked on a series of lesser-known elevision shows, such as FX’s The Booth at the End and a Crackle original series called Chosen, but it brought an air of legitimacy to the production experience. Meanwhile, the writing team at Remedy sat down with a group of writers hired specifically to work on the show’s scripts, and the two teams drafted an overarching narrative for the entire Quantum Break package.
“When we are workshopping a story, the writer’s room ends up looking like a crazy guy’s lair, because you have post-it notes covering all of the walls and the whiteboards are full of all sorts of scribbling,” Lake says. “Certainly there has been frustration trying to coordinate a story of this magnitude, but I think that there is frustration in every creative project – even doing it solo you end up in a situation where you’re fighting with yourself about certain things. But yeah, it’s been a lot of work, a lot of iteration, and challenging. But that also makes it interesting, and the game is clearly something new.”
A CRACK IN TIME
Working with two teams of writers, Lake’s original paragraph of a plot expanded into a full transmedia experience. The game would focus on small-town hero Jack Joyce (played by Shawn Ashmore), who returns to the college town known as Riverport after spending six years sowing his wild oats. Jack’s best friend, Paul Serene (played by Aidan Gillen), is involved in an ambitious physics project, but his financiers are threatening to pull their support. Paul hopes an unauthorized test run of an experimental time-travel device will give him the data he needs to pacify his investors.
Jack isn’t a scientist, but he is connected to this project thanks to his brother Dr. William Joyce (played by Dominic Monaghan), an eccentric physicist whose theoretical work on quantum physics served as a foundation for Paul’s time-travel experiments. Will tries to stop Jack and Paul from running their experiment, warning that the machine could cause a fracture in time that would eventually lead to the end of time itself.
Unfortunately, Jack and Paul have already begun their experiment, and as predicted, it goes horribly wrong. During the chaos that follows, Paul is forced to escape into the future, but when he returns, he is nearly two decades older and his mind has snapped. Paul is no longer the man Jack knew; he’s been hardened by experiences Jack knows nothing about. Even more bizarre, Paul is suddenly the CEO of a very powerful and heavily armed company called Monarch Corporation. When Will refuses to help Paul fix the mess they created, Paul murders Will in cold blood.
During a scene in the show’s second episode, Paul talks with Jack about how his memory feels stretched. He has experienced many things during his 17 years bouncing back and forth through time. For years, he tried to right past wrongs, but he always came up short. Paul recounts a story about how Jack and Paul watched a man fall to his death when they were only 11. Paul says he journeyed back to that day and tried to stop the man from dying, but every instance ended the exact same way. Paul now believes that time is a closed loop; some events are destined to happen.
Scenes from the show, such as this one, add insight into Remedy’s larger narrative, but Quantum Break’s gameplay will also affect each episode of the show. The easy pitch is that the game focuses on Quantum Break’s hero Jack, while the show focuses on the villain Paul, but good stories are rarely that segmented. Most of the game follows Jack’s exploits as he tries to fight against Paul’s ruthless behavior and works to prevent time from permanently freezing up. However, during certain moments in the game, players will take control of Paul, who has a special time-bending ability to see into the future. This allows Paul to make choices that will affect the overall narrative of Quantum Break.
Remedy calls these big choices “junction moments,” and players will encounter a new one before each of Quantum Break’s live-action shows. The live action is only four episodes long, but Remedy filmed several alternate scenes so each episode can play out differently depending on players’ choices throughout the game.
For example, if Paul chooses to execute an eyewitness to Monarch’s evil deeds then protesters will show up later in the game to rally against Monarch’s questionable activities. On the other hand, if Paul blackmails that witness into silence instead, there won’t be protestors, but Jack might have a scene where he interacts with the eyewitness.
The overall story for Quantum Break is fixed, so there is really only one ending in the game, but these choices color the narrative, and over the course of the game they will slowly add up. Remedy says that there are over 40 variations of the fourth and final episode.
A BREAK IN THE ACTION
Mikael Kasurinen had always planned on starting a career in big business, but his hobby got in the way. Whenever he had free time in the late ’90s, Kasurinen loved creating mods for games like Doom and Max Payne. He was so good at modding, in fact, that Remedy took notice and offered him a job as a level designer on Max Payne 2. Kasurinen never looked back.
However, after nine years of working on Max Payne and Alan Wake, Kasurinen felt like it was time to move on. He took a job at Avalanche Studios, assisting with the early development of the Mad Max game. After that, he worked at DICE on Battlefield 4’s single-player campaign. Kasurinen loved his experience working on games with large set-piece moments, but after shipping Battlefield 4 he began to long for designing the kinds of intimate, story-driven titles that he had worked on at Remedy.
“When I left Remedy, I really felt like I was leaving home,” Kasurinen says. “So I was excited when, right after we shipped Battlefield 4, Sam got in touch with me. He asked if we could meet up, so I flew back to Helsinki. He showed me an early version of Quantum Break on a laptop in a coffee shop. The next time we met up I was working here.”
The sequence Lake showed Kasurinen on his laptop was a vertical slice of the boat-crash level that Remedy would later demo at Gamescom 2014. The demo did a great job showcasing the team’s time-manipulating story, but there were still several elements of Quantum Break’s action that needed to be built out, and Kasurinen wanted to be the one to help build them.
“I think with Alan Wake, we were very focused on the story, and I think we had very solid gameplay, but at the end of the day there was not much variation,” says Kasurinen, who is now Quantum Break’s director. “Our goal now is to make it feel like there’s a sense of progression and variety while telling the story.”
Remedy wants all of the action in Quantum Break to flow naturally out of the story. To this end, the same failed experiment that gave Paul his time-manipulating powers also gave Jack powers. Jack hasn’t been quantum leaping through time for 17 years, so he’s still slowly learning the limits to his newfound abilities.
Jack’s suite of powers includes a Time Stop bubble that creates a localized sphere of frozen time. Not only is this great for crowd control, it also allows Jack to fire off a series of bullets at a single enemy, which results in a massive explosion once the time bubble collapses and all the bullets collide at once. A Time Shield power creates a protective circle around Jack that slows and deflects bullets. Time Rush lets Jack run up to enemies and perform a devastating melee attack in the blink of an eye. Similarly, Time Dodge functions like a quick dash, allowing Jack to quickly move out of a hot zone. One new power, called Time Vision, even highlights enemies and other important objects within the environment. Each of these powers has its own cooldown timer, and can be upgraded using collectable chronon sources that Jack can find throughout his journey.
“Getting the different time powers in place was a really big deal,” Kasurinen says. “One of our key goals with this game was making sure it wasn’t a normal cover shooter – that players weren’t just hiding behind crates shooting at stuff and throwing spells. We didn’t want the game to become that. We wanted the player to feel empowered by these abilities. We try to describe what’s happening with some pseudoscience, but at the end of the day, it’s all for the purpose of having the best possible gameplay.”
Players will need to make use of all of Jack’s time powers, because in Quantum Break, time fights back. Throughout Jack’s journey, he encounters a series of time stutters – moments where time has temporarily frozen. Thanks to his time powers, Jack is immune to these stutters and is free to explore the world while everything around him is frozen.
The team originally envisioned that these stutters would be great storytelling moments, and the mechanic seemed incredibly cool the first few times Remedy used it. However, it quickly grew boring, so the team was forced to iterate on the concept. They theorized that maybe time wasn’t just stopping – maybe it was breaking. As time grows more and more unstable throughout Jack’s journey, timelines become twisted and out of sync and objects begin to collide with each other. In these stutters time can also briefly rewind, creating a cycle of collisions that happen over and over again. Late in the game, time stutters become deadly obstacles that Jack must navigate using his time powers.
Collapsing boxes aren’t the only thing standing in Jack’s way. Monarch’s security forces have developed experimental equipment allowing them to manipulate time as well. As Jack progresses closer and closer to the heart of Monarch Security, he starts encountering more enemies who can also warp through time, using many of his own tricks against him. While designing these enemies, Remedy looked at NASA astronauts and deep-sea divers to get a feel for the actual tools someone might use when swimming through time.
“Quantum Break’s enemies are able to manipulate time, but not nearly as efficiently as Jack,” Kasurinen says. “You can imagine that Jack is almost like a fish in the sea, so swimming through time is natural and organic for him. Everybody else doesn’t have the powers he has, so they are like in a submarine. They’re wearing these clunky mechanical things that barely work and they are able to survive in that place, but not with the same kind of efficiency or grace as Jack.”
If Max Payne’s action was all about bullet-time, and Alan Wake’s action was all about disabling enemy shields with light before delivering the killing blow, then Quantum Break’s action is an exploration on the manipulation of time. Jack’s collection of new time powers makes him a more capable hero than any of Remedy’s previous protagonists.
SAVING THE FUTURE
This past August, Remedy celebrated its 20th anniversary. The studio invited all the developers who had ever worked on its games to come into the studio to mark the occasion. The team decorated its lobby to look like the forest from Alan Wake and crafted a series of microbrews, such as a Max Payne IPA, which it served out of the bar on the studio’s third floor.
Over these last two decades Remedy feels it has been defined as a studio that is constantly prototyping new ideas. Unfortunately, this means that Remedy’s development cycles have also been longer than average. But Remedy is aware that it’s slow. During the company party, when it toasted to another 20 years of game development, someone from the crowd shouted out, “and another three games!”
Remedy takes its time making games because it wants each title to feel special, and the extra development time often results in unique experiences and fresh ideas. Quantum Break is just the latest in that line of unique concepts.
But even a long development cycle eventually comes to an end, and with Quantum Break’s April release fast approaching, the studio is suddenly running against the clock. Quantum Break is a bold project. Remedy has combined two different media to create a unique approach to storytelling while adding to its pedigree of cinematic action with a combat system full of time-manipulation tricks. The studio has already come a long way, but it still has work to do before release. Hopefully time is on their side.