Alan Wake is coming to TV

Alan Wake is coming to television. A live-action series based on the atmospheric adventure-horror games is in the works with showrunner Peter Calloway (Cloak and Dagger, Legion) at the helm. Calloway is also said to be writing the series.

Developer Remedy Entertainment is on board for the project and will be partnering with Contradiction Films. The game’s creator, Sam Lake, will be the executive producer.

The announcement comes by way of Variety, which spoke to a member of Contradiction Films about the project.

“Alan Wake was basically a TV series that was put into a game,” said Contradiction’s Tomas Harlan. “That was Sam [Lake’s] vision. It was influenced by The Twilight Zone, Secret Window, Hitchcock, Northern Exposure, a lot of U.S. television.

“We plan to work closely with Sam on our this show. Sam is a huge part of this. This is his baby.”

Remedy Entertainment also shared the news with a short video starring Lake on Twitter, embedded below.

The Alan Wake franchise began in 2010 with the release of the original Alan Wake for Xbox 360 and Windows PC. The psychological thriller put players in the role of a middle-aged author in Bright Falls, a fictional town in the Pacific Northwest. The game shared some of the DNA from Remedy’s earlier Max Payne series, with a hefty dose of third-person shooting and melee sequences. Fans will mostly remember the game’s large, dimly-lit maps, however, where they scavenged for batteries and coffee with the beam of a flashlight.

In 2012, Remedy released Alan Wake’s American Nightmare. Critics were lukewarm on the sequel; Polygon noted that that game felt more like a detour than a true follow-up. As Polygon revealed in 2015, there was a much larger effort underway to create Alan Wake 2, but the project was eventually shelved. Nonetheless, the game casts a long shadow and remains influential in the industry to this day.