Still, it's fear of the consequences that keeps us from making mistakes

Nov 2, 2009 08:41 GMT  ·  By

You know a survival-horror game has some serious potential when it starts making the staff slightly insane. Threading on the edge of paranoia, one of the developers of Alan Wake discussed the possibility of cutting out the game's end for all pre-releases. Talking to G4TV, the developer shared his thoughts on the secretive attitude regarding the game during a Tokyo Game Show hotel showcasing of the demo. Spoilers are what developers want to prevent by denying full coverage of the title by the press.

Remedy Entertainment Managing Director Matias Myllyrinne gave an exact description of the developer's intentions. "I think we're going to be insanely careful about how much of the story we reveal."We'll clearly discuss with some of our friends at Microsoft whether we even give the ending of the game for anybody's preview. I'd like to hold it back, [I] don't want anybody to spoil it for the audience. That's just my personal feeling."

Whether or not Microsoft will be receptive to the idea remains to be seen, but most likely it'll seriously frown on it. As a publisher, its main concern is the sales and giving an unended game for previews would definitely hurt its score, and that would hurt the sales.

Spoilers are a common practice on the Internet, where rumors fly around without a control tower. It's no doubt that, as soon as a full version of the game would leave the developer's building, the entire story would be out for grabs on the entire net. If anything, we can just look at the "workprint" of X Men: Origins that appeared on the net a full month before the film was in theaters.

This wasn't even a pre-release sent out by the producers and leaked by the press, the net version was an unfinished "I can see the wires" version, with incomplete visual effects. The movie got jacked somewhere in the internal process of development and it was spoiled in its entirety, not just as far as its ending was concerned. If it truly believes that the story is what drives its game, then yes, Remedy has good reasons to fear the dreaded spoilers.