It's been 15 years (now 20!) since Max Payne's debut. Where do you have to go to find the roots of gaming's
most iconic noir series? Turns out, you go to Finland, to a town called Espoo. This is where
Remedy Entertainment developed their second game: a shooter called Max Payne. Max Payne came to us
via Finland, but the developers drew inspiration from Hong Kong action cinema and the hard-boiled
detective stories of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. In a 2003 interview with Videogame IT,
Remedy's lead game designer Petri Järvilehto described the elements of the film noir style that spoke to him the most:
(sultry) A hostile crime-ridden city... it's 2:30 in the morning and it's raining hard...
a cynical hard-boiled detective down on his luck. A mysterious woman who knocks on his door and leads
him into all kinds of trouble. A story told in long flashback... no happy endings.
Let's back up to 1996. Remedy had just released their first game, Death Rally, the previous year and the studio was looking
towards the future. They had three ideas: they can make a racing game that would build off the success
of Death Rally, in which players raced armed cars and blew sh*t up. They could make a real-time
strategy game set in space which would have been a little like Homeworld, according to a profile in
Retro Gamer magazine. Or they can make an isometric shooter: the project that they were calling Dark
Justice. They talked to Scott Miller, the founder of publisher Apogee Software, who had already
published the successful Duke Nukem series. Miller saw a chance for Remedy to do something similar,
and he suggested that they focused solely on Dark Justice. that was three years ago everything ripped
apart in a New York minute Miller envisioned a series that was narrative driven with strong
identifiable characters and he suggested that they name the series after the main character just like
a pooja had done with duke nukem and thus the name max heat was trademarked a placeholder
that would eventually become Max Payne the iconic name was joined by a not so iconic face sam lake
a writer and designer at remedy who because of the game's relatively small budget would have
to lend his face as the character model for the titular character max payne lake also wrote the
script for the game and he introduced the idea of comic book style cutscenes yet another element
that would set max payne apart as a series the final piece of the max payne puzzle is
its most famous mechanic bullet time max payne didn't invent bullet time but it was the first
mainstream video game to make it so cinematic the concept actually originated in action movies long
before the matrix popularized it with CGI in 1999 1981's kill and kill again was the first movie to
use the slow-motion shot that tracked a bullet in flight but ramping up the action of an explosive
action sequence with slow motion really came into its own with Hong Kong action cinema especially
in the films of director John Woo which have often been cited as inspirations for Max Payne
next Payton's bullet time was a perfect storm of awesome that kicked off the use of slow-motion in
games throughout the 2000s I was still in the force back then NYPD Manhattan Midtown North
Precinct Hell's Kitchen it stands to reason that the world of Max Payne is as much a part of the
game as its main character and yet the developers had never actually been to New York City instead
they drew most of the research from movies and books so in 1999 two years before the release
of the first game a group of six designers from remedy traveled to New York to learn as much as
they could about the place that Max Payne called home in an old blog post the Finns described their
trip to New York City as if they were visiting an alien planet they even hired two former NYPD cops
to serve as bodyguards and escort them through the unsavory corners of the city they refer to
it as level design Candyland and by the end of the trip they had more than 5,000 photos and 10
hours of video that would eventually become the base for the games textures locations sounds and
general atmosphere so how did they do Max Payne was finally released in 2001 it got nearly perfect
scores from IGN and GameSpot and it won a BAFTA for best PC game that year and it did what Scott
Miller had originally set out to achieve Max Payne was perfectly poised to become a hit franchise
the first Max Payne game had been in development in some form for five years and shortly after
its release take-two interactive announced that they had acquired the series and would
be funding remedy to make a sequel in 2003 that's only two years after the release of
the first game with the financial backing of a big publisher remedy was able to hire more
actors James McCaffrey continued to voice Max Payne but Timothy Gibbs replaced Sam Lake as
the face of Max Payne so that Lake could devote his full attention to writing the story in a
2003 interview with IGN Lake said he wanted Max Payne 2 to be a love story but a film noir love
story saying the idea was simply too delicious to pass over but in true film noir style this
story would have no happy ending there's no us in this you're a murder suspect I should take
you in well technically the game actually had two different endings one of which was
decently happy but it was only attainable on the hardest difficulty setting of the
game which is totally fitting for a story where the main character is suffering the whole time
along with the story changes there were a few technological changes as well the new havok
physic's engine made combat much more fluid and max could now dodge and shoot without draining his
bullet time meter overall max payne 2 got positive reviews and the pc version holds a score of 86 on
metacritic but for whatever reason it didn't sell as well as the first game take-two interactive
had to reef or cast their 2004 sales numbers and the series kind of laid low for a while but wait
they made a Max Payne movie starring Marky Mark and it totally sucked so the movie came out in
2008 that's a full five years after max pains glory days and almost 10 years after the matrix
introduced bullet time to mainstream audiences so it makes sense that by the time the film came out
critics were just sort of over it still it did manage to hold the number one position at the
box office on its released weekend and went on to become the 15th top grossing video game movie in
the United States yay but the games were not done yet remedy entertainment moved on to make Alan
Wake but in 2004 take-two announced that there would be another installment of Max Payne but Max
Payne 3d stayed in limbo for years until Rockstar Vancouver the division of take-two interactive
announced that it was working on the game time to move on get on with my life yes absolutely
Rockstar is a publisher best known for the Grand Theft Auto series and Red Dead Redemption and
Rockstar Vancouver borrowed heavily from those games for Max Payne 3 including an
almost identical cover system they also did something completely unexpected they took Max
Payne out of New York City the game was set nine years after the events of Max Payne 2
and saw max basically at rock-bottom no longer a police officer he finds work as a bodyguard
for a rich family in South Paulo Brazil the team at Rockstar Vancouver drew inspiration
from movies like 2007's elite squad this is a crime film set in Rio de Janeiro about a
Brazilian special police force called the be ope which became the basis for a fictional gang the
UFE in Max Payne 3 and just as the Finnish developers at remedy made their pilgrimage
to New York Rockstar made several trips to Sao Paulo Brazil canvassing the richest and
poorest parts of the city to make sure that the game was as authentic as possible there was one
thing I learned since I've been here it was that Brazilians came out of the womb kicking a ball
and for kids like these was there one legal chance at a ticket out of here in 2012 after
a lengthy development and several structural changes that take to Max Payne 3 was finally
released it was actually one of the first games that we covered here on polygon comm in our review
Arthur G's wrote while Max Payne 3 has about as much baggage as a game can carry rockstars
uncompromising vision has delivered something truly impressive the game got favorable reviews
but in the end rockstars deep dive into South Paulo didn't satisfy Brazilians the tropical
atmosphere of Rockstar South Paulo was said to be more similar to Rio de Janeiro just a
little reminder of how things have changed in 2001 Max Payne sold 4 million copies and was
considered a huge success in 2012 Max Payne 3 sold 3 million copies in its first week
now it's 2016 the Max Payne series is 15 years old remedy Entertainment has said that they'd
be interested in working on a sequel but every says that and with franchises like this rumors
of remastered versions are always swirling around as of yesterday there's no conclusive information
on where Max Payne is going and if it's going anywhere at all but if the series does fizzle
out it would be almost fitting we don't picture Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe going down in a hail
of bullets or finding their happy endings happy endings almost never exist in film noir remember
at the end of Max Payne 3 max walks off into the sunset maybe that's an ending that's meant to be
you