Alan Wake/Trivia

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• Development Hell: The game was in production for over six years. Some wondered if it was going to be entirely Vaporware until its release. Much of the information that leaked about earlier builds and scripts has resulted in a decent amount of wondering What Could Have Been.
• Dueling Games: Many people compared this game with Heavy Rain, although the only similar thing between them is that they're story-driven exclusives. The comparisons didn't stop Remedy from recommending their supposed rival game.
  • If anything it's Dueling Games with Deadly Premonition. Both are third-person shooters that came out in 2010, which star an anti-social guy who knows way too much pop-culture. Both main characters travel to a Twin Peaks Expy and battle Eldritch Abomination while fighting off things that appear human, but are not.
• Hey, It's That Voice!: For Spanish players! Alan Wake is voiced by Fox Mulder. This might also count as Bilingual Bonus due to the paranormal nature of the entire game.
  • Alan Wake is Robin Hood.
  • Thomas Zane is Max Payne.
    • In the same vein, Barry is Vinnie Gognitti (in the second game) and Rusty is Jack Lupino.
  • Some Finnish fans might just be wondering why Alan Wake is singing auto-tuned about an operator company and ice hockey.
• Screwed by the Lawyers/Keep Circulating the Tapes: The expiring music rights to the game meant that it was delisted from Steam and Xbox Live Arcade Marketplace on May 15, 2017.
  • Thankfully, people that already owned it on Steam didn't lose access and Remedy even had a big finale 90% off sale on the game and all it's DLC before pulling sales to give everyone interested a chance to pick it up.
• Torch the Franchise and Run: Alan is planning to end his popular Alex Casey series by killing off the titular character.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The very first trailer was released a long time before the game was released. Small details and even the premise changed during development. Later trailers would then reiterate the plot, but still got some other details wrong. What you can't see from the trailers is that it was originally going to be an open-world game. It was replaced with a more linear approach and unsurprisingly, some people were outraged. The developers have since then been much more careful about releasing information that might still change.
  • There were plans for more Taken animals to be used, such as Taken dogs and bears, but the developers didn't like the animations they got for them and so cut them. There's even a little misleading foreshadowing, such as a dog that goes missing (and another dog you hear about going missing over the radio). It's also very likely that at one point, they intended the wooly mammoth skeleton to come to life, since in the same building, you see a giant hole in the wall, and Alan remarks that it's "mammoth-sized". These are all probable leftovers in the script from when they planned more animals to attack you.
    • This also added to the creep factor since, without the Taken beasts, it made it seem as if there were far worse things out there stealing dogs, killing bears and deer, and crushing walls and cars.
  • Nathan Fillion was reportedly interested in taking up the role of Alan Wake.
  • Originally, a PC version was planned when the game was first announced. It was to require nothing short of a beefy octa-core CPU and a motherload of RAM because they were eschewing the then-popular PPU cards (Physics Processing Unit cards, then very new technology) in favor of CPU-based particle physics. The plans for a PC version was scrapped once Microsoft paid Remedy to make the game an Xbox 360 exclusive, which is probably a good thing because even as of 2010 octa-core CPUs have yet to make it to the market, the closest alternative being a server dual-CPU motherboard fitted with two quad-core CPUs, which costs well into tens of thousands of dollars, and even that they have a non-upgradable, low-end graphics card. Of course, had they held off the PC version until octa-cores started appearing (the first Intel ones were stated for mid-2011 and have yet to appear), the graphics would've been bootloads better than what the 360 is capable of.
    • Of course, the PC port is now out. It is, according to the critics, at least, the very opposite of a Porting Disaster. And just in time, too- the first Octa-core CPUs came out shortly before the release of the game.
• The Wiki Rule: The Alan Wake Wiki
• Word of God: According to Word of God, the "Night Springs" episodes were actually written by Alan earlier in his career. Which might explain some things about his current predicament.
  • Barry actually mentions this in-game if you watch the episode that's on a TV when he travels with you, but states this particular episode isn't one of Alan's.