We’ve all bought a second or maybe even third copy of a game we really, really love. Longtime Kotaku readers know of my obsession with re-buying Resident Evil 4. But I’m not sure there’s a game I love so much that I would buy thousands of copies of it. And there’s definitely not a game out there that I adore enough to buy thousands of unplayable, worthless copies of. However, someone out there really likes Alan Wake and buying silly stuff, because they recently bought 4,000 worthless copies of it.
The original Alan Wake, released in 2010, is a wonderful and weird action horror game developed by Control and Max Payne creators Remedy Entertainment. Its 2023 sequel might be one of the best survival horror games released in the last 10 years. And while the original game might not be as good as its recent follow-up, it’s still a damn fine game worth checking out in 2024. I don’t think you need 4,000 copies of it, though.
In an April 15 interview with PCGamesN, Alisa—an AV tech and massive Alan Wake fan—explained why she loved the original game so much. “What I love the most about Alan Wake and Remedy games in general is their way of storytelling and their absurd attention to detail,” she explained. “Alan Wake 2’s world especially feels truly alive, with so much hidden lore that many players will miss. A lot of the lore is also just really weird and charming. And Sam Lake is a genius.”
So when Alisa saw a strange $240 listing on eBay of two boxes filled with download vouchers for Alan Wake, she had to have it. And now, Alisa is the proud and happy owner of approximately 4,000 Alan Wake Xbox 360 promotional download cards. Alisa believes that the cards originated from a store that had “too many” unsold Alan Wake vouchers sitting around and tossed them into storage and forgot about them.
Alisa calls the two boxes of 4,000 Alan Wake cards an “Object of Power,” which is a reference to Control—another game in Remedy’s growing MCU-like universe. She apparently has tried to activate some of the cards, but they didn’t work. She suspects they were never activated by the original store and are now likely a decade old, so they are all probably unusable. But Alisa doesn’t care, telling PCgamesN that she bought the boxes filled with Alan Wake codes because it was “funny.” And she’s working on a video, too, where these will play a part. Once that’s done, she won’t get rid of them.
“I’ll probably cover a wall in my room with the cards, because that sounds funny. Also, I just really love Alan Wake.”
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