Alan Wake 2 is a activity like no other, as we mentioned in our modern 10/10 review of the video game. Element of that is owed to the game’s multimedia technique which sees the story mix regular online video sport stages and visuals with an array of new music and reside-motion into a lot of scenes in a unique and novel way. If you have played the video game, you know a person of these scenes, in individual, stands out as arguably just one of gaming’s most unforgettable and over-all very best times of the yr, or even potentially of the past numerous many years.

If you have not played it nonetheless, be wary of Alan Wake 2 spoilers in this short article.

Speaking on the Pals For every Second podcast, hosted in part by GameSpot’s really individual Lucy James, Solution resourceful director Sam Lake disclosed that Initiation 4, a dazzling chapter midway by means of the video game that features an elaborate dwell-motion musical through a fight sequence, was approximately taken out from the sport during development, top Lake and other individuals to argue in favor of trying to keep it in.

“It was truly, truly really hard for a range of reasons to have a musical in this,” Lake reported on the podcast. “And there were quite a few productions meetings [where people said] ‘Come on, we will need to lower this.’ I was like, ‘Absolutely not, we are not cutting it.'”

Lake went on to cite the good reasons why it was demanding for some to consider getting in the final version of the sport, such as how the live-action factors developed above time undertaking-broad, and how this sort of a scene could, in principle, be performed in distinctive strategies, indicating Cure had to determine how these types of a scene would even appear alongside one another, then commit to it even as online games can evolve so a great deal over the decades they get to arrive alongside one another.

“When you say to somebody, ‘We’re gonna put a musical in a survival-horror recreation, the issue comes to, ‘Well, how? What is the gameplay loop there?'” added video game director Kyle Rowley through the job interview.

The pair revealed the idea for a musical was Lake’s initially, owed in part to the robust reception to Control’s Ashtray Maze and the first Alan Wake’s concert standoff, the two of which used songs in enjoyable and novel strategies to travel interactive factors of all those games. “I realized that [Alan Wake voice actor Matthew Poretta] is a terrific singer, so Alan Wake can sing in this,” Lake recalled pondering. “And then getting David Harewood, who is superb as [Mr. Door], he has a background in singing.”

Lake went on to chat additional about how Poets of the Slide, the true-lifetime Finnish rock band that is featured as the in-universe band, Old Gods of Asgard, aided direct Harewood and Poretta, and how he hoped the choreographer would be merciful in their dance recommendations for a beginner dancer this sort of as himself. You can listen to the whole episode above, or skip to two hours and 13 minutes into the episode for the get started of the discussion about the game’s unforgettable musical.

Alan Wake 2 is out now on Xbox Series X|S, PS5, and the Epic Game titles Keep.