Remedy Entertainment

Early years and Death Rally

Remedy was founded on 31 August 1995 by demoscene members from groups such as Future Crew. The year after Remedy released its first game Death Rally, a top-down perspective racing shooter published by Apogee Software and distributed by GT Interactive. In the game the player competes in deadly races with armed cars, trying to finish first while destroying opponents and fulfilling missions.

Still attached to the demoscene, Remedy took part in the 1997 Assembly with Final Reality, a combination of a demo and a 3D benchmark program. Later that year Remedy founded a new company named Futuremark for developing benchmark software that would eventually turn into 3DMark.

In 1998, LucasArts approached them, citing that their logo was copied from the top portion of the LucasArts logo, and threatened legal action. Remedy was by that time already in the process of redesigning their logo, so they complied by taking their old logo offline from their website, and introducing their new logo a little later.

Max Payne

In 2001, Remedy released its second game, Max Payne, which tells the story of the eponymous fugitive undercover cop in New York City, vengeful for the murder of his family, framed for the murder of a DEA agent, and hunted by New York City Police Department and the American Mafia. The game is best known for its film noir influences and popularizing bullet time in video games.

In May 2002, Remedy sold all the rights to Max Payne to Take-Two Interactive for US$10 million and 969,932 shares of stock. The following year, a sequel, Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, was released by Rockstar Games. The latest addition to the series, Max Payne 3, was developed by Rockstar Studios and was released in May 2012.

Alan Wake and Death Rally remake

In 2005, Remedy revealed that it was developing a new intellectual property, Alan Wake, a game about a writer of the same name whose wife disappears during the couple's vacation in the Pacific Northwest. While searching for his wife, Alan realizes the events are coming to life from a thriller he does not even remember writing.

Alan Wake combines a third-person shooter video game with psychological horror, drawing inspiration from Twin Peaks and the works of Stephen King. The game was released by Microsoft Game Studios in May 2010. Alan Wake was extended with two downloadable content packs, titled The Signal and The Writer, which act as new episodes in the episodic storyline of Alan Wake.

In March 2011, Remedy published a remake of Death Rally, developed by Cornfox & Brothers and Mountain Sheep, for iOS. In February 2012, Remedy and Microsoft Studios released Alan Wake's American Nightmare, a stand-alone expansion pack that loosely continues the story of Alan Wake, set in the small town of Night Springs, Arizona. In the game Alan tries to chase down his evil doppelgänger, Mr. Scratch, who threatens Wake to take away everything he loves, including his wife.

Quantum Break and Agents of Storm

During the Xbox One event, on 21 May 2013, Remedy and Microsoft Studios announced Quantum Break. The game was released on 5 April 2016. At the 2013 VGX award show, Remedy revealed Agents of Storm, which was released by Flaregames for iOS in October 2014. In 2015, during the development of Quantum Break, Remedy's CEO, Matias Myllyrinne, and head of franchise development, Oskari Häkkinen, departed from the company. The game was released in April 2016.

Current projects

Remedy announced that it had formed a new team and is currently working on two different projects, neither of which will be related to Alan Wake. In the following month, Remedy announced their partnership with Smilegate, and that they would handle the single-player story mode of Smilegate's upcoming game CrossFire 2.