Alan Wake is a very Remedy kind of game: Interesting characters, weird story, beloved by fans, and not really a hit. It's been nine years since its original Xbox 360 release and more than seven since it came to PC, and there's no sign of a sequel—but writer Sam Lake told IGN that he still hopes to do one.
"I want to make it. It's a curious thing," he said. "At this point, so much time has passed. I feel that the bar is higher in some ways. It needs to be done right if it's ever done. Everything needs to click into place, which is really hard to make it happen. So many things, for these big games to be greenlit, need to be aligned. But I'm hoping that someday [it can be made]."
I would imagine that, for now, Remedy is pretty busy with Control, the dimension-warping action game with the weird, shapeshifting gun. Interestingly, Control actually came to be after Remedy started thinking about what Alan Wake 2 would look like. In the end, it decided that what it was working on didn't "quite feel like Alan Wake" and went on to create a new world while putting Alan Wake 2 on hold.
A different concept for an Alan Wake sequel was also created right after it released, and ideas from that concept eventually went into Alan Wake's American Nightmare, as well as Quantum Break.
"I kind of feel, personally, that on and off, ever since the first game, I've been working on the sequel," said Lake.
Couple Lake's interest in making a sequel with Remedy's reacquisition of the publishing rights to the series a few weeks ago and the prospect of a sequel is still distant but maybe not quite as far off as we thought. There's also an Alan Wake television show in the works.
Low-key interest in Alan Wake is persistent, and the videogame industry is built on sequels, so it's far from impossible. Although, funnily, Remedy hasn't done a sequel since Max Payne 2 in 2003. (Max Payne 3 was developed by Rockstar.)