Remedy Entertainment’s Alan Wake 2 is one of the best games of 2023; it features a lot of unique content and ideas. However, one of the best parts of the game was almost removed from the game. Thankfully, due to the efforts of creative director Sam Lake and others, they fought to keep it in the final product.

Beware of game spoilers below:

In an interview on the Friends Per Second podcast (two hours and 13 minutes into the video) hosted by GameSpot’s Lucy James, Sam Lake said:

“It was really, really hard for a number of reasons to have a musical in this. And there were many productions meetings [where people said] ‘Come on, we need to cut this.’ I was like, ‘Absolutely not, we are not cutting it.'”

Alan Wake 2 game director Kyle Rowley added:

“When you say to someone, ‘We’re gonna put a musical in a survival-horror game, the question comes to, ‘Well, how? What’s the gameplay loop there?'”

They also revealed that the Alan Wake 2 musical sequence was Sam Lake’s idea in the first place, who suggested it due to the positive reception of the Ashtray Maze musical sequence in 2019’s Control and a concert sequence in 2010’s Alan Wake.

Sam Lake added:

“I knew that [Alan Wake voice actor Matthew Poretta] is a great singer, so Alan Wake can sing in this. And then finding David Harewood, who is wonderful as [Mr. Door], he has a background in singing.”

The Alan Wake 2 musical sequence features a song by Poets Of The Fall, a real-life Finnish rock band that stars in the Remedy Connected Universe (RCU) of games as the fictional band, Old Gods Of Asgard.

Check out our full review of Alan Wake 2 by heading over here.

You can watch the entire Alan Wake 2 musical sequence below: