This year we celebrated Remedy’s twenty-fifth anniversary. We wanted to hold a big party with all our friends and partners, since you only turn twenty-five once, but unfortunately, COVID-19 said no. Instead, we raised a toast to each other and ourselves together on Zoom, celebrating with champagne and while wearing our special 25th anniversary shirt, created specifically for Remedians. (Mental note, never put future release dates on shirts…)
Did you know that our first game, Death Rally, was made by a very small team of people that rose out of the Finnish demo scene? Death Rally was published in 1995, and this year we made the classic version of the game free for everyone on Steam, forever. You can get it here! As one Steam user says: “a little piece of history, and there is nothing not to like about that”.
2020 was another milestone for us – Alan Wake came out ten years ago. We celebrated with Bright Falls Week, a week of streams of Alan Wake by content creators we love to collaborate with. You also shared your memories of the game with us across social media. There were so many incredible, fun, cool and touching memories (one of them even made us cry!), but we have to single out the Alan Wake browser game that one of our fans made – you can play it here.
You were able to get a first glimpse of what Remedy’s single-player campaign for CrossfireX looks like, which was revealed exclusively during the Xbox Games Showcase this July. Everyone got a first taste of Operation Spectre, which will be told from the perspective of Black List, one of the two warring mercenary factions from the world of Crossfire. Our single-player campaign will explore the global conflict between Global Risk and Black List, delving deeper into the world of CrossfireX that was originally created by our partners at Smilegate Entertainment.
CrossfireX is the first version of the game to come to console, releasing exclusively for Xbox One and Xbox Series S|X in 2021.
We are also preparing for the CrossfireHD PC release in China, published by Tencent in 2021, which will also include our single-player operations.
In 2020 we also released the two expansions for Control. The Foundation and AWE came out, and you had a lot of fun exploring the bedrock of the Oldest House and the abandoned Investigations Sector.
AWE was the first piece of content from one of our games that has been created almost entirely while working from home. We’re lucky to have been able to adapt to remote work quite well, thanks in large part to our highly skilled IT team.
2020 was Control’s first anniversary, and we made a short thank you video for our community, featuring some of your work and quick thank-yous from Sam Lake, Mikael Kasurinen, and Courtney Hope and Matthew Porretta.
Since the launch of Control, we have released several free updates, including a new game mode (Expeditions), the Photo Mode, new Service Weapon forms for all players, and the Assist Mode options to make Control more accessible for all kinds of different players. Which is a whole lot more than we were able to do with our past games.
You spent a whole year with Control, playing it on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and also on Nintendo Switch, in Xbox Game Pass, and in a very limited fashion on Amazon Luna in the US. Here’s some fresh statistics we gathered for you on the time you spent in the Oldest House:
We announced something big – we signed with Epic Games to publish two new multi-platform games. We can’t wait to show you what we are working on, but it’s going to be a while until you see it. We have always aimed to be open with our work, but only when we have something meaningful to show.
AWE has been our first step into showing you the Remedy connected universe (or RCU), and we are already working on a future Remedy game that takes place in the same universe. Of course, each of our games stands on its own, but we want them to also serve as gateways into a larger universe, where more experiences are waiting for you.
When we say we'd make games from anywhere, we mean it.
2020 has been a strange, challenging year for a lot of us. Many of us haven’t been working at the studio for a long enough time that it’s going to be weird once we do come back. But we hope to all be back as soon as it’s safe. And until then, we’ll keep making games for you from our living rooms, offices, sofas and wherever there’s a stable internet connection.
2021 is going to be exciting. See you all next year!
Vida Starčević (Community Manager)
