Alan Wake’s opening quote was purchased for $1 from Stephen King

Lauded writer Stephen King sold the rights to use one of his quotes in the opening of Alan Wake for $1, according to Remedy.

Speaking to Eurogamer, Remedy’s Sam Lake said that he “desperately wanted,” to open the game with a quote from King, whose work is clearly a huge influence on the first game.

“Creating the original Alan Wake, I really, really desperately wanted a quote from him to start it off,” Lake told Eurogamer. “It’s my understanding he wanted $1 for us to get the rights to use it. [It was] so very generous.”

The quote in question is: “Stephen King once wrote, ‘Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there’s little fun to be had in explanations; they’re antithetical to the poetry of fear.’

“In a horror story, the victim keeps asking why – but there can be no explanation, and there shouldn’t be one. The unanswered mystery is what stays with us the longest, and it’s what we’ll remember in the end.”

The quote is from an Entertainment Weekly article from 2008 entitled, “Why Hollywood can’t do horror,” in which King lamented the inability of big studios to develop horror films for a mass audience.

VGC recently sat down with co-director Kyle Rowley and principal narrative designer Molly Maloney to talk about how Alan Wake 2 differs from its predecessor, and what other pieces of media inspired the sequel.

When asked about the comparisons to King’s work in the first game, and what media influenced the follow up, Molly Maloney said: “I’d say True Detective comes up a lot.”