When Max Payne developers Remedy made the jump to the current generation of consoles, they left their multi-platform roots behind with them. Alan Wake ended up being released exclusively on Xbox 360, although we all know that there was a PC version planned for some time, too.
What we didn’t know though, was that in early days of the project, Mr. Wake was set to hit PS3. The project started life as multi-platform but Remedy later signed an exclusive deal with Microsoft to bring it to their platform alone. CTO Markus Mäki recently spoke on the initial decision to drop the PS3 build to CVG, saying: “We needed to be top notch in some areas, but we knew we couldn’t do everything better than some developers out there. For example, this meant there was no multiplayer. That wasn’t in our core set of skills and it would have been a huge effort.”
It also meant that for the best possible experience, one of the platforms had to go.
“We also took the approach to license middleware that made sense,” Mäki added, “even when we didn’t end up using it all for one reason or another. And then, the big deal – to go with Microsoft and take one big technological effort, the PS3, out of the equation. That then changed the technology risk to a business risk – but that’s a subject for a different talk altogether…”
PS3 has become infamous for its challenging development. With ports sometimes ending up the way they do on PS3, maybe it’s best that Remedy stuck to one console.
