Lake reveals, “What we also then discovered fast, that if we want to do this more as an aggressive flash like thing, then the idea of blending it on top of the game footage actually loses its meaning, it isn't giving us anything… for more horrifying moments - we started calling them horror flashes - and ended up just doing them kind of full screen and stylizing them quite strongly as black and white and just aggressive in many ways.” However, in this case, mixing the live action footage with the game actually made the horror less intense. And it’s this eye for the movies that led to such a memorable, and bloody game over screen. With games like Quantum Break and Control under their belts, the studio has become one of the most cinematically inclined game studios currently working in the industry, mixing live-action footage in with their games to create a visually distinct experience that blurs the lines between mediums. The team at Remedy learned a lot of new tricks since they released the first Alan Wake game. The entire sequence was shot on a film set says Lake, with Alan Wake’s leading man, Ilka Villi, “lying on the ground… we had our makeup artists come in and kind of create a disturbing, violent vision of him all bloody and kind of having suffered a violent death.” “We had already kind of discovered that this is how we do horror flashes and that's suitable for it, but then we wanted to create just really striking violent imagery for it.” “It felt like we needed to show the horror in between when you die, we need to make it disturbing,” Lake says.

But the creative process was still largely trial-and-error. Lake says the process of creating the game over screen for Alan Wake was built on top of their experience with working on live-action set pieces for Control and Quantum Break.

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