Alan Wake TV Series Put Into Development With Peter Calloway, Sam Lake

Alan Wake is set to be turned into a TV series with Peter Calloway (Under the Dome) attached as showrunner and writer, developer Remedy Entertainment announced Wednesday. Sam Lake, the lead writer on the game and known for his work on Max Payne, will serve as executive producer. Contradiction Films – which has previously worked on video game adaptations such as Mortal Kombat: Legacy and Dead Rising: Watchtower – will be Remedy’s producing partner on the show.

“Alan Wake was basically a TV series that was put into a game,” Contradiction Films co-owner Tomas Harlan told Variety. “That was Sam’s vision. It was influenced by The Twilight Zone, Secret Window, Hitchcock, Northern Exposure, a lot of US television. We plan to work closely with Sam on this show. Sam is a huge part of this. This is his baby.”

The Alan Wake series won’t adapt the game as it is, but rather treat its story as “a starting point”, Lake said. “[It is] the seed which will grow into the bigger story we’re exploring in the show. We’ll be expanding the lore of this crazy and dark universe and diving deeper into certain aspects of it than the game ever did.”

And in doing so, the show will tap into the story that was planned for the Alan Wake game sequel that never came to be. “Not only that, but through the years, we’ve worked on multiple game concepts and stories for Alan Wake’s world that have never seen the light of day,” Lake added. “All of this material will function as potential source material for the show.”

Originally released in 2010 for Xbox 360, Alan Wake followed a bestselling author trying to uncover the mystery behind his wife’s disappearance while on vacation in a small Washington town called Bright Falls, while experiencing plot events from his last novel brought to life, which he doesn’t remember writing.

As Harlan said, Alan Wake was designed as a TV series, consisting of six episodes and two special ones. Remedy had even produced a tie-in miniseries to promote the game, so this won’t be the first time that the game will get the live-action treatment. As it’s just going into development, there’s no release date on the Alan Wake TV series, which will try to find a network home starting in October, Harlan said.

In addition to writing for Under the Dome, Calloway worked on the first season of Legion and Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger. Lake pushed his love for TV-as-game further with 2016’s Quantum Break, which had live-action episodes embedded into the gameplay. His next project at Remedy, Control, is out 2019 on PC, PS4 and Xbox One.

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