Max Payne: Hard Boiled in New York – Retrospecial

A dark, melancholy atmosphere, coupled with stylized slow-motion gun fu combat and a classic noir-style revenge story: Max Payne revolutionized the gaming world over 20 years ago and is still one of the best story shooters of all time. In our retro special we show what made the game stand out so much from its genre colleagues and reveal why it still had a difficult time in Germany. So let’s dive into video game history and the past of May Payne!

Max Payne (buy now ) is a broken man. After the birth of his child, he actually wanted to step back with the police. Now he finds himself in the biggest nightmare of his life. A group of junkies broke into his suburban home and murdered both his wife and newborn daughter. The burglars were high, stoned on a designer drug called Valkyr. Max killed the addicts with his Beretta, but was too late to save his family.

This traumatic event haunts him throughout his life and drives him to work as an undercover cop at the DEA to bust the drug ring around the devil’s stuff and bring down those responsible for his family’s death. Three years after the stroke of fate, May Payne finds out about the dealers and infiltrates the Punchinello mafia family.

Max actually wanted to step down for his family, now his life is falling apart right at his feet.

Source: Computec Media GmbH

However, when he meets his contact in the subway, he is shot dead by an unknown person. With his back to the wall, Max doesn’t give a damn about camouflage and embarks on a bloody revenge campaign through New York City, which has been paralyzed by a blizzard of the century. Corpses pave his way as he fights his way through Italian mobsters, Russian gunrunners and mercenary troops to the truth.

The typical revenge story penned by Sam Lake is driven by depressive self-destruction and drips with film noir atmosphere. The style is based on John Woo’s Heroic Bloodshed flicks and especially the first Matrix part. The image of a man in a trench coat, armed with two pistols, diving into a hail of bullets in slow motion, has been firmly associated with the character of Max Payne since 2001. Despite and maybe even because of the extreme depiction of violence, the game has an immense aesthetic that even sparked the discussion at the time as to whether video games should be considered art.

Since developer Remedy could not afford professional actors at the time of the first part, friends of author Sam Lake mimicked the characters in the game. Poets of the Fall guitarist Olli Tukiainen lent the face of gangster Vinnie Gognitti, while Lake’s mother played villain Nicole Horne. Lake himself, of course, took the leading role.

Sam Lake’s mother played villain Nicole Horne in the comic strip cutscenes.

Source: PC Games

The distorted faces in the comic strip cutscenes have become iconic. Although the actors tried really hard, a certain amateurishness always shimmered through their performance, which gave the first part of the Max Payne series a hell of a lot of charm. Many speakers, on the other hand, were professional actors and James McCaffrey, the voice of Max, in particular, won the hearts of the fans. His rasp organ, which sounds like a diet of whiskey and cigarettes, fits perfectly into the setting and guides the player through the story.

In addition to a few cutscenes, it was mainly told through sequences in the look of a graphic novel, for which photos were manipulated so that the pictures look like they were drawn. The noir touch comes across particularly well in Lake’s lyrics. The deeply melancholic and strivingly poetic monologues sometimes oscillate between genius and foreign shame, but are consistently sympathetic.

The repeated interspersed puns about pain also show that Lake didn’t take the story dead seriously and that the somewhat slanted writing, which is reminiscent of trash crime novels, is quite intentional.