Sam Lake interview — How storytelling creates value in games

For the past 24 years, Sam Lake has been the creative director at Remedy Entertainment, writing the stories that have become the heart of games such as Death Rally, Max Payne, Alan Wake, Quantum Break, and most recently Control.

He got his start in scriptwriting after his friend Petri Järvilehto, a founder of Remedy, needed a story to go with the racing game Death Rally. With the 2001 shooter game Max Payne, he wrote the script, which turned out to be about four times as long as a lot of movie scripts. But since Remedy had no budget to hire actors, he also served as the face model for the main character (Updated 12/9/19: James McCaffrey did the voice acting).