STACK April 2016 Issue 138

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Sam [Lake, game director] had an idea which
then turned into Quantum Break."
You may find yourself thinking that time
travel has been done to death, and Remedy
agrees. However they’re certain this title will
stand out.
“Sam has a saying: ‘The things that people
look at as clichés, Remedy looks at them as
classics'," notes Puha. "Time travel has been
done many times, but we take it and we
put our own twist to it. Give the players and
the audience something that’s familiar, but
obviously add a new spin to it."
This new spin had perhaps come pre-
emptively when Life is Strange was released;
the folks at Remedy were big fans of Dontnod’s
episodic title, but development on Quantum
Break began a long time prior to that.
“Time travel stories are notorious for all their
loopholes, so we really spent years figuring out
the story, how it makes sense, [making sure]
that there are no loopholes," explains Puha.
"The central theme is really, 'can you actually
change things?'”
The difference is in the details. “With the
time travel in Quantum Break, we talked to our
scientist [They have a scientist? - Ed] about all
the black holes and the like, so the actual time
machine is very unique in the game. It’s not
a DeLorean or anything like that," he laughs.
“It’s very, very unique. Some time was spent
on the hard science behind these things, but
obviously they only go so far, and you have to
actually make it interesting and fun."
Given its lengthy development cycle, players
were certain the title would undergo heavy
gameplay changes; would what we saw at E3
three years ago still be in the finished product?
Thankfully, Puha lays these concerns to rest.
“All the stuff you saw in 2013 and 2014 is
visit GAMES FEATURE
56 APRIL 2016
GAMES
J ack Joyce is a man out
of time. Literally. The
victim of a lab
experiment gone wrong, he and
his partner both attain time-
altering powers, and must team up
to save the future from the maniacal
Monarch Securities.
This is the basis of Remedy Entertainment’s
new IP, Quantum Break. Public relations
director at Remedy, Thomas Puha, enlightened
us on the challenges of bringing this expansive
new IP to light.
“You have to figure out so many things," he
says. "First of all, you have to figure out the
universe. We’re doing a time travel story in
Quantum Break, so just figuring out the rules of
time travel itself takes a lot of time. And that's
even before we started creating the characters
and all of that stuff."
Quantum Break is also Remedy’s first Xbox
One title, and they didn’t take the move to
Microsoft’s console lightly.
"You have to rebuild a lot of your technology
from the past generation," explains Puha. "You
have the technology already, you usually have
lot of ideas left over and you’re up and running
a lot faster, but when you’re working on new IP
with all new hardware, there’s a lot of things to
figure out, and that just takes a lot of time.”
As far as the time-stopping story goes,
Quantum Break is a sort of spiritual successor
to the studio’s previous title, Alan Wake.
According to Puha, the game was spawned
from a quantum physics-based idea, but was
sidelined during work on Alan Wake’s American
Nightmare.
“We were talking with Microsoft about
whether we should do Alan Wake 2, and the
timing sort of wasn’t right at that point, but
Timing is
Everything
You would have first heard of it back at E3 in 2013, and since then, Remedy
Entertainment have been buried deep in development on their upcoming third-
person-shooter Quantum Break. Responsible for killer releases like Max Payne
and AlanWake, the Finnish studio are no strangers to live-action video game
integration. Alesha Kolbe spoke with public relations director, Thomas Puha.