Max Payne
By Alex Kierkegaard / August 9, 2009
Finnish wonder dev Remedy Entertainment, established in a suburb of Helsinki in 1995, showed signs of promise long before unleashing one of the industry's crowning achievements over half a decade later, but no one could have predicted from them what this small team of extremely talented and dedicated individuals was really capable of. Their first release, an addictive top-down racer called Death Rally (1996), established their credentials, whilst their second project, a 3D accelerator benchmark program called Final Reality (later renamed 3DMark), instantly met with tremendous success, prompting Remedy to spin it off into a separate company founded for this purpose, and quickly becoming the de facto standard in 3D benchmarking.
Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, one can certainly discern the seeds of Max Payne's greatness in those two early projects -- the profound Roman maxim, ex nihilo nihilo fit, holds true here as everywhere. Death Rally showed that this garage band of Finns (barely numbering two dozen people -- several of whom, it should be noted, had come from a demoscene background) knew how to design solid games, whilst 3DMark demonstrated that they were as capable on the technical side of things as on the theoretical. Two more ingredients remained for greatness: burning ambition and sufficient resources (both in terms of time and money), the existence of the first of which we can infer from the end result of their endeavors, whilst the second was provided by FPS-specialist gurus 3D Realms, whose top brass were so taken by Max Payne's prototype and design document that they patiently supported Remedy throughout its lengthy four-year development, wisely keeping a tight lid on the project, and refraining from setting the hype machine in motion until barely a few weeks before the game's eventual (and several times delayed) July 2001 release date.
One of the things that I have often wondered about Max Payne is the exact point in its development at which the Bullet Time mechanic was introduced. Had it been present from the beginning, at the contract negotiations with 3D Realms? It must have been, otherwise it'd be hard to account for their enthusiasm in supporting the project -- in which case The Matrix could not have been an inspiration for it, as is often claimed, since the film premiered in March '99 while the initial brainstorming sessions at Remedy had taken place nearly three years earlier, in late '96. John Woo's action movie repertoire, then (which certainly contained more than enough slow-motion gunfights to inspire a couple dozen videogame developers, not just one), must have been Remedy's sole source of inspiration: the famous Chow Yun-Fat films had all been released well before Remedy began work on Max Payne. References to Woo are anyway plentiful in the game even outside the action: at one point his name even serves as a password for entering a gangster hideout, while at another, during a scene in which Max gets ambushed, he jocularly quips that he "made like Chow Yun-Fat".