It often happens in the world of video games to use the phrase “it’s like a movie”, the boundaries between the two media often blur and video games for many years have tried to get closer to the Seventh Art to obtain its prestige and captivate the public. Max Payne, which turns 20 these days, undoubtedly was one of those games that can make us say it often, both for the story it tells and for the timing with which it came out.
“They were all dead. The last blow was like the exclamation point at the end of what had happened. I loosened my grip on the trigger. It was all over ”. The first words spoken by Max Payne as the camera moves along a skyscraper immersed in a blizzard in New York they laid the perfect foundation for one of the most evocative and celebrated shooters ever made. A game that popularized “bullet time” within the action genre by mixing the noir, the mythology Norse, the world of cartoon and Hong Kong action movies in a story of vendetta, paranoia and madness that still today you want to replay.
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The development of Max Payne begins in 1996, the year of release of Tomb Raider, which will represent one of the main inspirations for the title of Remedy, whose goal was, however, to do something even more powerful on a visual level, with a strongly cinematic cut and a hard boiled inspiration able to capture the attention of the players, but avoiding a protagonist who perhaps the classic hero without blemish and fear .
An important moment for the game was there decision to use comics for the cutscenes instead of cinematic moments that exploited the game’s graphics engine. A choice made to save on costs and development times that turned out to be very apt. One of the most interesting aspects of Max Payne in fact it is the ability to combine first-rate action scenes with a narrative that manages to stay on the thin line that separates a good noir tale with a parody that takes itself too seriously. Phrases such as “It was a few hundred bullets that I had stopped collecting evidence. I had pushed myself so past the point of no return by having passed it, without even realizing it ”are exactly what it takes to anticipate the next adrenaline-pumping shooting.
The other factor that played in favor of Max Payne it was undoubtedly the timing. The game was due to come out in the summer of 1999 but it was eventually postponed to 2001, Matrix had arrived in cinemas two years earlier, bringing to the general public the aesthetics and shootings typical of John Woo films and Asian cinema, but above all he had definitively cleared the term “bullet time” or that slowing effect with which a director can highlight the path of a bullet or some particularly spectacular stunts. Max Payne makes extensive use of bullet time, since the protagonist can dive in any direction and at the same time shoot with greater precision, taking advantage of the extended time, the comparison between the two works was obviously immediate and supported by Remedy, which ended up including more than a tribute to the Wachowskis’ film.
To achieve smooth action the Remedies, which were a studio with limited funds, were forced to work in an almost artisanal way. Not being able to count on one motion capture studio the protagonist’s movements were filmed in a gym thanks to a developer’s friend who was a martial arts instructor and weapons expert, and then redo them completely by hand. To make the atmosphere even more realistic some of the staff took a trip to New York, so you can take hundreds of photos of buildings, streets and interiors to replicate in the game. Finally, since the faces of the game were taken from photographs, relatives, friends and neighbors ended up in the game as passers-by or henchmen, while Sam Lake, author of the game, lent his face to Max, becoming a kind of meme before memes for his frown.
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The end result was that Max Payne already represented an ideal melting pot of possibility offered by the medium: a very classic cinematic story enhanced by the possibility of experiencing spectacular shootings worthy of Matrix with a graphic level at the top for the period and with some passages to read like a comic. It wasn’t a perfect game, and some reviews they pointed the finger at a not very innovative plot and the comics breaking the beat too much, but it was a game full of character. The game was quite successful, two followed by a film adaptation (horrible) and helped to project Remedy in the ranks of software houses to always keep an eye on.
After him bullet time began to spread to many titles, so much so that it is still used today in masterpieces such as Red Dead Redemption 2 and in Control, Remedy’s latest effort, in which Max’s DNA and his taste for shootings can still be felt, 20 years later.
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