Max Payne Screenplay Used As The Writer's Actual College Application

Sam Lake, the writer who brought Max Payne, Alan Wake, Quantum Break, and the upcoming Control to life, recently shared an intriguing personal anecdote with IGN Unfiltered. During his college years, Lake's drama professor required the students to submit a 75-page screenplay. Caught between the demands of work and his studies, Lake submitted the script for his video game.

"The drama teacher had just returned to [Finland] from Los Angeles," Lake said. "He'd been here for years studying and doing script doctoring, things like that. He came back to Finland and started to teach screenwriting. In the setup for that, he was saying 'You can choose: you write in Finnish or you write in English.' That felt, to me, that's perfect. You needed to send 75 pages of screenplay as a sample, so I just sent Max Payne."

After departing from university, Lake spent a year and a half studying screenwriting for TV, movies, and video games at the Theater Academy of Finland. He wrote a horror film during the program and later incorporated much of the content into Alan Wake. 

"For each semester we would do a full-length movie screenplay and one of them, a horror movie I wrote, I ended up stealing a lot from that from myself into Alan Wake," Lake revealed.

Lake got his start with the Remedy Entertainment back in 1996 when founding member Petri Järvilehto asked him to help write Death Rally. Lake went on to to play several roles in the development of the Max Payne series, including acting as the face model for the title character. He now serves as Remedy's creative director and go-to frontman, frequently representing the company during interviews and other media appearances. Putting his studies to good use, Lake will also executive produce a live-action TV show based on Alan Wake.