Sam Lake

Sami Järvi (born 18 July 1970), better known by his artist name Sam Lake ('Järvi' is Finnish for lake), is a Finnish writer who is known for his work on the popular Max Payne video game series and for writing Alan Wake. Lake is good friends with Petri Järvilehto, a founding member of Remedy Entertainment, the company behind Max Payne. Järvilehto needed help with script writing in one of Remedy's early games, Death Rally, and invited Lake to write. Järvi also wrote the script for the upcoming game named Quantum Break, for a 2016 release.

Career

Max Payne

Lake played several roles in the development of Max Payne. He wrote the game's story and script, helped design levels, and was the face model for the character of Max Payne. He posed as Max Payne in the game's graphic novels as well. Because of the game's budget, Remedy could not hire actors. As a result, Lake, along with other Remedy programmers, artists and staff played the roles.

In the sequel, Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, the expanded budget meant Lake could stick to writing. The game's script ended up being about four times as long as some movie scripts. For the sequel, the budget increase allowed the team to hire professional actors to model for the graphic novel cutscenes and Lake was subsequently replaced by actor Timothy Gibbs. However, if the player should watch any of the TV set shows during the game, they will see that Lake models for various characters in Max Payne's meta, in TV shows and billboards, such as John Mirra in the television show Address Unknown as well as "Lord Valentine" and "Mama" in Lords and Ladies, and, finally, "Dick Justice" in Dick Justice. There is also an unofficial mod to give the character his old face back.