In the summer of 1999 Computer Gaming World previewed a game from a Finnish studio it had to introduce to its readers. “Remedy isn’t very well known,” it wrote: the company’s “biggest hit to date” was a driving game, Death Rally, and that had been “a lackluster seller”. The new game was Max Payne, a noir thriller about a New York cop whose gunfights played out in “John Woo-style slo-mo”. When it came out in 2001 it sold, by Wireframe’s count, more than 7.5 million copies over the following decade, and Edge later credited Remedy with popularising bullet-time. The studio behind it had started in 1995 in a basement in Espoo, and Edge counted it among the companies founded by members of the demo group Future Crew.
Fast facts
- Founded: 1995, in Espoo, Finland.
- Founders: Samuli Syvähuoko, Markus Mäki, Sami Nopanen, John Kavaleff and Sami Vanhatalo.
- First game: Death Rally (1996), a shareware combat racer for MS-DOS.
- Best known for: Max Payne (2001) and Max Payne 2 (2003), Alan Wake (2010), Quantum Break (2016), Control (2019) and Alan Wake 2 (2023).
- Technology: its Max-FX engine ran Max Payne and the early 3DMark benchmarks of Futuremark, a company that grew out of Remedy in 1997.
- Listed: on Nasdaq First North Finland from May 2017, and on the main list of Nasdaq Helsinki from May 2022.
From demos to a studio
By the mid-1990s Future Crew’s members were finishing school and needed paid work. Samuli Syvähuoko, who had joined the group in 1991 under the handle Gore, told Wireframe in 2022 that publishers were already calling: “our technical skills at the time were so high we were constantly being contacted by game publishers around the world asking us to start making games.” He had been reluctant to start a company, Wireframe reports, because of his own shareware outlook, but in 1995 he formed Remedy with Markus Mäki, Sami Nopanen, John Kavaleff and Sami Vanhatalo. The magazine names two other Finnish studios founded by demo groups before it: Bloodhouse, from Bloodsuckers, and Terramarque, from CNCD.
The first office was a basement. “The company was founded in ’95, just four kilometres down the road, in a basement!” the chief executive, Matias Myllyrinne, told Edge in 2011, from a much larger Espoo headquarters with a motion-capture room, a sauna and shelves of prop guns.
Death Rally
Remedy’s first game, Death Rally, came out for MS-DOS in 1996 and was sold as shareware, with Apogee as its publisher. It was a racing game with guns. A German shareware advertisement summed up the loop: race armed cars, then spend the winnings on stronger engines, armour and weapons. GamePro previewed it for readers who liked Road Rash, promising 18 tracks, one to four players, mines to lay and spectators to run over, and Duke Nukem as one of the rival drivers. Its music was by Purple Motion of Future Crew, as an Italian magazine pointed out in 1997.
It was, in Wireframe’s words, “a modest hit”. Remedy kept it alive long after MS-DOS had gone. In 2009 the studio released a version that ran on modern PCs for free, after years of mail from fans, and that led to a remake for iOS with the Finnish studio Mountain Sheep, Remedy’s first game on Apple’s phones. In 2020, for the game’s 25th anniversary, Remedy gave the original away on Steam.
Final Reality and Futuremark
In 1997 Remedy showed something that was not a game. At Assembly ’97 in Finland it premiered Final Reality, a benchmark that ran 3D scenes on a PC’s graphics card and scored the result. German magazines testing cards in 1998 called it the benchmark of VNU’s test labs and reported the results in “Realitymarks”. Edge wrote in 2011 that Futuremark was “born out of Remedy in 1997 to develop the studio’s Final Reality 3D benchmarking tool”. The Futuremark entry tells the rest of that story.
Max Payne
Max Payne took far longer than planned. Remedy had begun discussing a hard-boiled detective story in late 1996, Wireframe reports, and expected development to take a year and a half; it took four and a half. “We were complete amateurs in project management,” Syvähuoko said, but the studio had “the business-savviness to start talking to Apogee Software early on”, better known by then as 3D Realms, “and they kept funding us even though we were constantly late with our schedules.”
The previews showed what the time was going on. Computer Gaming World described radiosity lighting, a skeletal animation system that made “capes and coats flap in the wind”, and a team of artists sent to New York with cameras to photograph the streets for textures. Edge in 2000 noted that the developer was “particularly keen to show off its own Max-FX technology”, and that Remedy would release its level editor and effects tools with the game so that players could build their own.
The game came out for Windows in 2001, published by Gathering of Developers. The American advertisement called its slow-motion “bullet-time gameplay” “a first in gaming”. Bullet-time let the player slow the action at will, dive across a room and pick off enemies one by one. Computer Gaming World’s review called it “the gaming world’s first mindless blockbuster” and was hard on the writing, which it found “laughably ridiculous” in its attempts at noir, but it could not stay cross: “The action was too hot, the slo-mo bullet-time too cool. It really never got old.” The story was told in comic-book panels made from photographs, and Remedy’s writer, Sam Lake, stood in as the face of Max himself.
Max Payne sold about 82,000 copies in its first month, Wireframe reports, and more than 7.5 million by 2011 once it had reached the PlayStation 2 and Xbox. In May 2002 Take-Two bought the Max Payne brand from Remedy and Apogee for $10 million and about 970,000 shares, and commissioned a sequel from Remedy straight away. Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne came out in 2003 for PC, PlayStation 2 and Xbox. The series then passed to Rockstar, which made Max Payne 3 in-house.
Late Goodbye
Max Payne 2 ends with a song. Sam Lake had been friends since childhood with Marko Saaresto, who had just formed the band Poets of the Fall, and Lake gave him a poem to turn into lyrics. The result, “Late Goodbye”, plays over the end credits. “They had an even bigger role in Alan Wake,” Lake told PC Gamer in 2018: there the band also played a fictional group, Old Gods of Asgard. In Alan Wake’s American Nightmare the hero’s agent is on tour with them.
Alan Wake, Quantum Break and Control
Remedy’s next game was Alan Wake, published by Microsoft in 2010 for the Xbox 360, with a PC version as well. Its hero is a novelist in a small American town, fighting enemies wrapped in darkness that his torch has to burn away before a bullet can hurt them. Edge‘s 2011 survey of the Finnish industry praised its “deft talent for toying with players’ expectations”, and a Remedy recruitment advertisement in the same issue claimed close to 10 million copies sold across the studio’s games. A smaller spin-off, Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, followed in 2012.
When Microsoft unveiled the Xbox One in 2013, it showed a teaser for Remedy’s Quantum Break. Edge’s caption suspected that Phil Spencer’s introduction “referenced Max Payne’s invention of bullet time with good reason”: time was the new game’s subject. It came out in 2016 for Xbox One and PC, with a live-action television series woven into the game, whose episodes changed with the player’s choices.
Control (2019) put the player in the Oldest House, a brutalist office building full of possessed security guards, with a gun and telekinetic powers. Looking back over the console generation in 2020, Wireframe called it “one of the most engrossing action games of the past few years”, and credited its destruction physics and its architecture.
Since 2017
Remedy’s shares began trading on Nasdaq First North Finland on 29 May 2017 and moved to the main list of Nasdaq Helsinki on 4 May 2022. Alan Wake 2 came out in October 2023, a survival-horror sequel for PC through the Epic Games Store, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. Remedy reported in February 2025 that it had sold more than two million copies and had recouped its development and marketing costs, so that the studio had begun to earn royalties.
The next launch went badly. FBC: Firebreak, a multiplayer shooter set in the world of Control, came out in June 2025. In October Remedy issued a profit warning citing its weak sales, and two weeks later its chief executive of nine years, Tero Virtala, stepped down. The co-founder Markus Mäki, the company’s chairman, took over as interim chief executive until Jean-Charles Gaudechon, formerly of Electronic Arts and CCP Games, took the post on 1 March 2026.
Remedy set the worldwide release of Control Resonant, the sequel to Control, for 24 September 2026. A remake of the first two Max Payne games, made with Rockstar, is also in production.
Sources
- Jack Yarwood, “Beyond Max Payne”, Wireframe issue 64, June 2022, pp. 28–31: Syvähuoko’s quotes, Remedy’s founders, Bloodhouse and Terramarque, Death Rally in 1996 as “a modest hit” and its free Steam release in 2020, Max Payne’s development, first-month and lifetime sales, Take-Two’s purchase in May 2002, Max Payne 2, Sam Lake as Max’s face model.
- “Finland” and the Remedy studio profile, Edge issue 229, July 2011, pp. 166–169 and 180–181: Remedy, Futuremark and Bugbear founded by Future Crew members; popularising bullet-time; Alan Wake; founding year, the basement office, the Espoo headquarters, the 2009 free PC re-release of Death Rally and the iOS remake with Mountain Sheep; Remedy recruitment advertisement (“close to 10 million copies sold”).
- Futuremark studio profile, Edge issue 229, July 2011, p. 186: Futuremark “born out of Remedy in 1997 to develop the studio’s Final Reality 3D benchmarking tool”.
- Edge issue 228, June 2011: Death Rally as Remedy’s first iOS title.
- “The History of the Future Crew”, the group’s own history, republished by apollo-X Demo Resources, December 1999 (web, secondary): Remedy’s premiere of Final Reality at Assembly ’97. https://wayback.defacto2.net/apollo-x-demo-resources-1999-december-17/fc.htm
- PC Player (Germany), May 1998, p. 164: graphics-card test using “the benchmark of VNU Labs, Final Reality”, scored in Realitymarks.
- PC Player (Germany), December 1996: shareware advertisement for Death Rally.
- Svet kompjutera (Yugoslavia), February 1997: advertisement listing Death Rally under Apogee.
- GamePro issue 99, December 1996: preview of Death Rally.
- Letters page, Zeta (Italy) issue 23, February 1997: Death Rally’s music by Purple Motion of Future Crew.
- “Gathering of Developers” feature and Max Payne preview, Computer Gaming World issue 179, June 1999, pp. 103–104: “Remedy isn’t very well known”, Death Rally “a lackluster seller”, lighting, animation, New York photography, slow motion.
- Max Payne preview, Edge issue 87, August 2000: Max-FX technology and the editing tools.
- Max Payne advertisement, Computer Gaming World issue 206, September 2001: “Bullet-time gameplay — a first in gaming”.
- Review of Max Payne, Computer Gaming World issue 208, November 2001: “the gaming world’s first mindless blockbuster”, the writing, bullet-time.
- “Killer Rigs”, Computer Gaming World issue 215, June 2002: 3DMark2001 SE “uses Remedy Entertainment’s MAX-FX technology”.
- Andy Kelly, “The story behind Late Goodbye, the song that defined Max Payne 2”, PC Gamer, 21 August 2018 (web, secondary): Lake and Saaresto, the poem, the end credits, Old Gods of Asgard. https://www.pcgamer.com/the-story-behind-late-goodbye-the-song-that-defined-max-payne-2/
- Alan Wake’s American Nightmare feature, Edge issue 236, January 2012: Barry Wheeler on tour with Old Gods of Asgard.
- Review of Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, Edge issue 239, April 2012: publisher Microsoft, developer Remedy; preview of Max Payne 3 on the series’ move to Rockstar.
- Xbox One report and interview with Phil Spencer, Edge issue 255, July 2013: Quantum Break unveiled.
- Remedy Entertainment, game pages for Death Rally, Max Payne, Alan Wake, Quantum Break, Control and Alan Wake 2 (web, secondary): release years and platforms; Quantum Break’s live-action show. https://www.remedygames.com/games
- Control preview, Wireframe issue 4, December 2018; “Games of the generation”, Wireframe issue 45, November 2020, p. 39.
- Nasdaq Helsinki, “Nasdaq Helsinki welcomes Remedy Entertainment to Nasdaq First North Finland”, 29 May 2017, and “Listing on the official list of Nasdaq Helsinki: Remedy Entertainment Plc on 4 May 2022” (web, secondary). https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2017/05/29/999478/0/en/Nasdaq-Helsinki-welcomes-Remedy-Entertainment-to-Nasdaq-First-North-Finland.html
- “Alan Wake 2 has sold more than 2 million copies, Remedy is now making royalties from it”, VGC, February 2025 (web, secondary), reporting Remedy’s financial statements for 2024. https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/alan-wake-2-has-sold-more-than-2-million-copies-remedy-is-now-making-royalties-from-it/
- Chris Scullion, “Remedy CEO steps down, two weeks after it issued a profit warning due to FBC: Firebreak’s ‘weak sales’”, VGC, 22 October 2025 (web, secondary). https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/remedy-ceo-steps-down-two-weeks-after-it-issued-a-profit-warning-due-to-fbc-firebreaks-weak-sales/
- “Remedy Entertainment appoints Jean-Charles Gaudechon as CEO”, Gematsu, 9 February 2026 (web, secondary). https://www.gematsu.com/2026/02/remedy-entertainment-appoints-jean-charles-gaudechon-as-ceo
- Remedy Entertainment, “CONTROL Resonant launches worldwide on September 24”, 2 June 2026 (web, secondary). https://www.remedygames.com/article/control-resonant-launches-worldwide-on-september-24
- “Video games to look forward to in 2023”, Wireframe issue 70, p. 21: Alan Wake 2, the Max Payne remake.