Speaking on GameSpot’s “Friends Per Second” podcast, Remedy’s creative director Sam Lake said that the musical theatre-style content in the game’s fourth section was nearly removed entirely.
“It’s really, really hard to make a musical for a number of reasons,” Sam Lake said on the podcast, “and there were a lot of production meetings [where] people said, ‘Come on, we need to cut this. ‘ I was like, ‘Absolutely not, we shouldn’t be removing this content.'”
Game director Kyle Rowley said, “The problem comes when you say to someone, we’re going to put a portion of a musical theatre in a survival horror game, how do we do that? What to do with the pacing of the game there?”
And Sam Lake says the singing of Matthew Poretta, the voice actor for protagonist Alan Wake, drove the idea.
“I knew that Matthew Poretta was a great singer and that’s why Alan Wake’s vocals were of such a calibre,” recalls Sam Lake, “and then David Harewood, who has a background as a singer, was also approached and he was also very good .”
