Remedy Entertainment’s Quantum Break has garnered its fair share of skepticism. The Xbox One exclusive from the developer of Max Payne and Alan Wake will be accompanied by a TV show with intertwining elements to the game, and given how despised the word “TV” has become thanks to Microsoft, one wonders what drove Remedy to even attempt the same in the first place.
Speaking to GamesIndustry International, CEO Matias Myllyrinne addressed the same. “In terms of where we’ve seen a lot raised eyebrows is where the TV elements are tied in. For us, our games are a melting pot of popular culture. Look at Max Payne, it has graphic novels, in Alan Wake we had pages of a novel, we had live TV shows and radio. For us, this is taking it to its logical conclusion.
“So the game and TV show ship together as one cohesive package. The TV show is episodic. So the episodes of the TV show are interwoven with the episodes of the game. The storylines take place in the same location. Hypothetically you can watch one or play the other but you’ll get so much more out of it if you combine them together.
“For us it seems like a logical thing to do now. If we fell short of anything on Alan Wake I think it was the facial acting and performance. That’s something we really wanted to address. We’ve spent a lot of time researching methods and we now have visual doubles where all the nuances of the actors are captured. We have our new technology, called North Light, that we built. It’s funny because it raises up a new set of issues and challenges.”