How Alan Wake 2’s Composer crafted the sound of The Dark Place

29.11.2023 - 15:43 / gamedeveloper.com / Sam Lake / Alan Wake / Matthew Porretta

A funny thing happened when I sent questions over to Alan Wake 2 composer Petri Alanko. After he sent over his responses, I had the uncanny experience of realizing they sounded like something Alan Wake himself would write.

“The duality of it all is always there, hanging like a heavy cloud. The Dark Place starts, little by little, leaking into our world, 'poisoning' all the events here in our normal world,” he said. "The border between the two places is very clear in the beginning, but the line blurs and blurs, until only a haze remains."

You can imagine these words being uttered in Matthew Porretta’s gravely tones as the clack of a typewriter rings out.

Alanko has been the composer on every game in Remedy’s shared universe since the original Alan Wake—a series he would have been right in thinking he'd never return to. In 2013 creative director Sam Lake declared that the game had not sold well and a sequel was not coming.

It seems Lake had to eat his own words. Three games and 13 years of experience later, Alan Wake 2 is here. For Alanko, it’s a project that's been in the works since 2011.

“I wrote the first tracks for a sequel back a year after the first Alan Wake,” Alanko said. “I actually forgot a lot of what I had [originally] written. Until I went through my backups four years ago, when the signs of Alan Wake 2 finally started to appear.”

Remedy is a studio many in the industry would consider lucky. As its ambitions get larger, so do the budgets, in this instance thanks to the studio’s benefactor Epic Games, who funded Alan Wake 2’s development.

“In the first Alan Wake, I was using only a string orchestra (with an occasional oboe), but here things needed to be very different,” Alanko said. In the sequel, he said the hardest challenge was scoring Alan's mental state. The composer wanted to convey an Alan that had spent 13 years in the Dark Place—the ways it had altered his mind.

In defining the sonic identity of the Dark Place, Alanko used brass instruments and altered their natural sounds. “How would instruments sound like if they were played underwater,” was a question he asked himself.

To create the more demonic sounds of Alan Wake 2, he built a device from a 1950s enamel washbowl to process the brass through. “I attached piezos and contact mics to it and fed sounds through it,” he said, “ I made a set of impulse responses from it, which I then used in every single possible convolution plugin I could possibly get my hands on.”

Alakno also used an instrument with a name straight out of an Alan Wake novel—the Apprehension Engine and The Mega Marvin. The former is a large stringed instrument that Alanko calls a beautiful wooden beast. It was created to make sounds for horror movies. Alanko spent hours trying