Remedy Entertainment

Remedy Entertainment is the Finnish studio developing and self-publishing Control Resonant. Founded in 1995 in Espoo, the company has spent three decades building narrative-driven action games on its own proprietary technology, and Resonant is the first sequel it has shipped on its own Control intellectual property after buying the rights back from its previous publisher in early 2024. Sam Lake serves as creative director across the studio's slate, with Mikael Kasurinen acting as game director on Resonant.

Studio Profile

Studio History

Remedy was founded on August 18, 1995 by ex-members of the Finnish demoscene group Future Crew. Demoscene roots gave the early company a deep bench of low-level engine and graphics programmers, and that culture of in-house technology has carried through every project since. The studio's first commercial release, the top-down vehicular combat game Death Rally (1996), was followed five years later by the noir third-person shooter Max Payne (2001), which established the writing voice and cinematic framing that would become the studio's signature.

Remedy went public on Nasdaq Helsinki in 2017, trading under the ticker REMEDY. The listing funded a multi-project pipeline and a long-term move toward self-publishing. In 2022 the company opened a second studio in Stockholm, expanding its developer base outside Finland for the first time. The Espoo and Stockholm offices both contribute to current projects, and the company describes itself as a single distributed team rather than two separate studios.

Notable Games

The catalog spans noir crime, cosmic horror, time-warping science fiction, and paranatural action, but a shared thread runs through every title: a strong central protagonist, dense in-world fiction delivered through documents and audio, and live-action or photographic elements integrated into engine cutscenes. Control (2019) introduced the Federal Bureau of Control setting that Control Resonant continues, and FBC: Firebreak (2025) is a separate co-op shooter set inside the Oldest House rather than a sequel to Control.

Key Leadership

Sam Lake first joined the studio as the writer on Death Rally and has been the creative throughline ever since, also serving as the original face model for Max Payne and as Alex Casey in Alan Wake 2. On Resonant, Mikael Kasurinen leads the project as game director, while Sergey Mohov heads gameplay design for the melee combat systems that define the sequel's identity. Thomas Puha handles external communications and is the most public-facing voice on the project outside of Sam Lake himself.

Northlight Engine

Northlight is Remedy's proprietary engine, originally built for Quantum Break in 2016 and continually iterated across every title since. The engine is tightly coupled to the studio's content pipeline, including the destructible environment system, the volumetric lighting toolset, and the integrated cinematic playback used for the live-action and photographic sequences in Quantum Break and Alan Wake 2. Owning the technology end to end is a deliberate strategic choice and is one of the reasons the studio has been able to ship distinctive-looking games at a smaller team size than most action-adventure peers.

For Resonant, Northlight has been pushed in several new directions. The studio is targeting a stable 60 frames per second during destruction-heavy combat, expanded draw distance for outdoor zones, more simultaneous enemies on screen, and a broader lighting palette that covers daylight, fog, and weather conditions the previous Control's interior corridors did not require. The shift from a single brutalist building to a paranaturally altered Manhattan drove most of those engine investments.

Self-Publishing Pivot

For most of its history Remedy worked with external publishers. Resonant marks a deliberate move toward self-publishing, made possible by two transactions in 2024. In February 2024, Remedy acquired the full Control intellectual property rights from 505 Games for approximately seventeen million euros, consolidating ownership of both the existing 2019 game and any sequels or spinoffs. In August 2024, Remedy announced a co-financing and co-production partnership with Annapurna Pictures that covers Resonant itself and also extends to film and television adaptation rights for the wider Control franchise.

The combined effect is that Resonant ships under the Remedy label rather than a third-party publisher, with Annapurna sharing the financial risk and the long-term media exploitation upside. Remedy has publicly described the Resonant project budget as roughly fifty million euros and stated that the title will need around three to four million units sold to break even. Owning the IP also means that future Control projects, whether direct sequels, spinoffs, or adaptations, can be greenlit on the studio's own timeline.

Unconfirmed Details

Several specifics about the studio and its current production have not been disclosed and should be treated as open questions:

• The exact size of the Control Resonant team and how it compares to Alan Wake 2 or Control 1.

• The precise split of work between the Espoo headquarters and the Stockholm studio on Resonant.

• Future Remedy projects beyond Control Resonant and the already-released FBC: Firebreak.

• Whether the Annapurna partnership extends to specific film or TV projects in active production.

See also the Overview and the melee combat systems page for how the studio's design choices map onto Resonant's gameplay.