Thanks Complicated Music Licensing Schemes: ‘Alan Wake’ Updated To Remove Bowie Song From Credits

Here we go again. For those of us that view video games as a vital and still emerging form of culture and art, one of the more frustrating aspects of the industry is how music is licensed for game soundtracks and how that licensing complicates games as they age. For instance, we saw this play out earlier this year with an aged Spec Ops: The Line game getting delisted from Steam entirely, much to the surprise of both the public and the director of the game. The culprit? Well, the licensing for the soundtrack in the game had expired.

Now, think about what this means if you place this in the context of preservation of culture. Soundtracks are obviously important in entertainment mediums. Music can make or break a film or TV show. Video games are no different. I fell in love with the Mass Effect series long ago, for example, and a huge part of it was the atmospheric draw of the soundtrack.

But as important as the music is, as I can feel the copyright protectionists out there nodding along with me, so too is the cultural output that makes use of it to create a whole new piece of art. Take the hit game Alan Wake from 2010 as an example. Alongside an excellent original score, the soundtrack also features several licensed songs, most notably David Bowie’s Space Oddity. Or, it did, that is, since the original release will have that song stripped out of it in an update due to a licensing expiration.

Space Oddity plays over the Alan Wake credits roll, and it seems reasonably on-point: The tale of a man utterly alone, helpless, slowly floating toward his doom, but overcome with awe and at an odd sort of peace with the whole thing—and, in his final moments, thinking of his deep love for his wife. And hey, even if you don’t buy my ideas of thematic similarities, it’s just a great song.

Next week, though, it’ll be gone—from some versions of Alan Wake, anyway. “Alan Wake (2010) will receive an update on September 10th at 11am UTC,” Remedy tweeted. “The update will be to all PC versions (Steam, Epic Games Store, GOG). This update removes the song Space Oddity from the game due to changes in licensing, and replaces it with a new original song by Petri Alanko, Strange Moons. Alan Wake Remastered (2021) will not be affected by the update.”

Because the remastered version was released a decade later, and presumably had a separate licensing arrangement for the licensed works, that version will retain the Bowie song. So, we have two versions of what is essentially the same game, but which will have completely different songs playing during the credits.

This may not seem like a huge deal. And in the grand scheme of geopolitical affairs, wars between nations, etc. and so on, it isn’t. But it’s a big deal for culture, if nothing else. And it would be hard to find a better example of how absurd these licensing arrangements can be than this, in which we have two versions of the same game that will be demonstrably different due to the soundtrack.

Remedy didn’t say why Space Oddity is being pulled from the original Alan Wake but will remain in Alan Wake Remastered, but our assumption is that the remastered release is newer and thus the licensing deal will expire later, even though they’re essentially the same game. Seems silly to me, but such is the way of the world sometimes—especially when it comes to business deals.

Yes, the world of licensing music for video games is indeed in a very silly place. But I don’t want to simply accept that this is the way the world works. The prospects of preserving the original artistic output of a work of art like Alan Wake isn’t something we should just ignore.