Alan Wake 2’s pair of directors have thanked fan wikis for helping them keep track of all the small details from the original games.

You might think you’re a big fan of something, you may even be the creator of a beloved text, but no one will know more about a piece of media than a fan wiki. As it turns out, this is definitely the case for Alan Wake as well, as in a recent interview with Sam Lake and Kyle Rowley, co-directors on the long awaited Alan Wake 2, the pair have go so far as to thank those that have written for Alan Wake fan wikis to help them “remember the details.”

Lake and Rowley recently appeared on The Friends Per Second Podcast, where they also shared the game’s best bit almost didn’t make it in. But Lake also said that he wanted to “officially give a big thank you to all the wonderful fans keeping Alan Wake wikis up to date. I confess, I trust these people, I’ll be thinking, ‘We said something about this in the original Alan Wake but I can’t for the life of me remember the details.'”

This isn’t to say that Lake, Rowley, and the rest of the team working on the story did nothing at all though. “We do have a full narrative design team on top of the writing team,” Rowley noted. “Which is led by [lead narrative designer] Simon Wasselin, who’s tracking everything; we have stuff logged in internal documentation, as we said, the story is often complex and even I’m going like, ‘what the hell were we meant to be doing here again?'”

Honestly, it’s been a while since I’ve played the original Alan Wake myself so I don’t exactly blame them for using fan wikis. Besides, considering the series is now part of a larger connected universe alongside Control, it’s even more complicated to keep track of. So a little bit of Googling never hurt anyone…