REMEDY ENTERTAINMENT

From Max Payne to Control: how one studio stayed true to its obsessions for 25 years

- Alex Spencer

The version of Remedy Entertainment that exists today is – as you’d expect – totally unrecognisable from the studio that was founded 25 years ago. Today, its Espoo office houses hundreds of employees, juggling four projects and partnerships with Microsoft and Epic. Back in 1995, it was half a dozen Finnish kids who’d come together in the demoscene, working out of a parent’s basement and gradually taking over the entire house. For everything that has changed over the years, though, it’s easy to see the line that connects Remedy’s earliest games to the ones it’s working on today.

But, we ask CTO and co-founder Markus Mäki, is that how it feels when you’re looking back over the last quarter-century of your own life? “There’s definitely not a straight line,” he says. “I don’t think there can be, in a business that changes this quickly – and we were all so young when we started the company.” Mäki was there at the beginning, as part of Future Crew. Its demos combined boundary-pushing graphics with techno music created using the team’s own tools. The technology is ancient, hacked together on early PCs, but the audio-visual experiences it created, such as Second Reality, remain striking today.