Chiefly written by Sam Lake, "Alan Wake" took over five years to create—an unusually long development time in the game industry. The game was originally developed as an open-world survival game as an anti-thesis to Remedy's prior linear "Max Payne" games, but struggled over three years in merging the gameplay with the action-thriller story they wanted to tell. After an intense two-month period, the team reworked the game to be a more traditional linear game broken into an episodic approach but which better supported the planned narrative structure and capable of reusing much of the open world assets already built.