Max Payne: Expanding What’s Possible
2001 was a year of change in a variety of ways. The less obvious and more personal included graduating from high school, moving away from home for college, and being responsible for myself in a way that hadn’t really happened yet. Moving in with roommates that I wasn’t directly related to, finding a place to rent, finding a job in a new place where I didn’t already know someone. This didn’t all hit at the same time, but over the course of six months or so, and was a period of change unlike anything I was used to. I’m sure I’m not alone in some of these experiences, as that time in life is full of new experiences for many young people. Beginning to see the world and my place in it in a new way was eye opening. More than once I found myself staring like a deer caught in the headlights at the sheer possibility of everything. Thankfully the normal rhythms of life kept me from becoming overwhelmed even as my mental framework for what could be expanded. The routine of classes, work, and sleep helped but it wasn’t long before I realized I could adjust these guardrails for myself, determine what was and wasn’t important to me, and act accordingly.
At the same time that I was discovering new possibilities in the way I was living my life, my experience of the scope of storytelling in games was also expanding. In the course of my relatively sheltered upbringing, the video games that I was exposed to were all fairly basic: simple gameplay loops like Tetris or Pac Man, standard platforming in Super Mario Bros, adventure games like Ocarina of Time, and competitive classics like GoldenEye, Smash Bros, and Mario Kart. (Yes, we were a Nintendo household, how did you know?) Branching out to the PC, it was primarily shooters like Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force and Chex Quest that occupied my time. While there was a bit of variety in the games I played, the primary themes were always simple competition or heroes saving the day from dastardly villains. So imagine, if you will, the relative culture shock of playing through Max Payne for the first time in the fall of 2001.
Max Payne was stylish in a way that I hadn’t seen before, with an aesthetic built not around bright colors or attempts at matching television and movies, but the gritty locales of New York City slums – the kinds of places you’re not likely to see on brochures for the Big Apple. Not only was the setting grim, but the protagonist himself wasn’t the hero I was used to either. In the opening minutes of the game, we’re introduced to a man living through a nightmare scenario. Wife and child murdered, career upended, and soon quickly framed for murder of his partner, Max isn’t the stalwart hero who weathers it all unchanged. He is ground down by the tragedy of his circumstances, willing to lose himself in his pursuit of justice vengeance. Thankfully the developers at Remedy never let Max veer too deeply into self-seriousness, allowing Max to maintain something of a sardonic wit about him as a defense against grief and hopelessness, as well as including a few humorous bits sprinkled throughout the game. But there are literal nightmare levels where the player is forced to relive the deaths of Max’s family, including a drug-induced delusion that questions whether it wasn’t Max that did it.
To say Max Payne was eye-opening about the kinds of stories that video games could tell would be an understatement. Up to the point of launching the game for the first time, film noir-style narratives in my experience were limited to movies and comic books. Max’s quest to track down and eliminate those responsible for his personal hell, while perhaps justified, wasn’t the kind of selfless-hero story I was used to. Complex protagonists with questionable motivations became possible all of a sudden where before this was – at best – limited to the antagonists of whatever game I might be playing.
The sequel, centered around Max’s relationship with assassin-for-hire Mona Sax, only deepened the complexity of the character and the world which he inhabits. Guilt over his attraction to another woman after the death of his wife? Split loyalties between Mona and his job? Betrayal at the hands of former allies? It may be standard fare for noir tales, but it still felt fresh and new to video games. And though this wasn’t entirely new ground being broken thanks to the first game, the sequel improved on the original in every way to the point that Max Payne 2 still felt like it was opening the door to new possibilities. If the first game was simply about revenge, the second was about desire, duty, and loss in a way that few games since have even tried to talk about. Remedy, once again, succeeded at creating an engaging experience that pushed the boundaries of what games could be.
And then the franchise went dormant.
For nine years.
Rockstar Games purchased the rights to the Max Payne IP after the success of the first game, and had Remedy develop the second, publishing it in October 2003. The problem comes in when Rockstar released Grand Theft Auto III less than three weeks later. Grand Theft Auto quickly became the game that everyone was talking about, and the more narrative-heavy but “crime themed” Max Payne franchise felt a bit redundant to the publisher, I’m sure. They went all-in on developing more Grand Theft Auto titles, and Remedy went on to developing other games instead. There were always rumors among the die-hard Max Payne fans that another game was on the horizon, and the game was supposed to be released in 2009, but it wasn’t until 2012 that the game was actually released, this time developed by Rockstar themselves.
I didn’t end up playing Max Payne 3 when it released, despite it being a title I had looked forward to for years following Max Payne 2. I had been anticipating Mass Effect 3 more than anything at that time, but I’ll admit to being a little leery of the game as a result of it not being developed by the originators of the IP, but by those who’d earned renown for developing the Grand Theft Auto titles – games which I personally don’t care for. I didn’t have a computer at the time that I was confident could run the game well, and I was stuck on the notion that I needed to play it on PC where I’d played the previous two games, as had been the case with the other games. And so I just didn’t play Max Payne 3.
For nine years.
Xbox held a 20th Anniversary Celebration event in November 2021, and part of that celebration was the announcement that the entire Max Payne series was going to be added to the list of backwards compatible titles. This was the catalyst for getting me back into the series, finally starting up a game that I’d purchased on sale some years earlier but never actually played.
It’s worth noting that I’m in a different place than I was when I first was awed by Max Payne 20 years ago. For one, I’ve experienced grief that I couldn’t have imagined then. I’m also established in my career and in my community. I have a sizable library of games to play that I’ve never touched, and my attention can’t always be devoted as fully to the games I do play. And while I’m still occasionally awed at the freedom available to me to dictate how I live my life, maturity and responsibility have tempered that somewhat. No doubt this all changes how I’m going to view games today versus how I did then, right?
Playing through the first two games again, I was struck by two things: 1) though they do work on Xbox, they play so much better on PC, and 2) though the graphics and mechanics have aged, the games are still quite good, and there’s nothing quite like them.
I’m more mixed on Max Payne 3. The game was clearly developed for more modern action game audiences, capitalizing on the popularity of other third person cover-based shooting games. It runs much better on Xbox than the first two, but I’d wager that’s likely because the Xbox 360 was the lead development SKU, as was the case with many games at the time. It still has the signature Bullet Time mechanic, still plays in third person with a variety of weapons, but the comic book storytelling panels are gone, replaced instead by a kind of Ang Lee’s Hulk-inspired picture-in-picture thing and a filter that visually disrupts cutscenes in a way that’s more distracting to me than any kind of enhancement to the storytelling it may provide. Max is also far more humorless in the third title, with Rockstar instead leaning into the idea of him being a broken man driven by… a paycheck?
It’s perhaps a little more jarring having just come off of the first two games, where the character is clearly driven by pain, loss, and a desire to move on but an uncertainty on how to do so, let alone being unclear on what is and isn’t acceptable about that desire. In Max Payne 3, the depth of the character is reduced to almost nothing. He’s a man committed to his own self-destruction, convinced that somehow he’s responsible for the deaths of the women in his life that he cared for. He’s broken by his experiences, certainly, and so wallowing in self-pity is understandable, but the Max from the previous games pushed on through the tragedy in pursuit of some kind of peace. In the first game, Max eliminated those responsible for his family’s deaths, and then surrendered to the authorities. In the second, after Max has wrought his vengeance once again, he again turns himself over to the police, a kind of justice having been achieved. In Max Payne 3, not only does Max start out drunk and self-destructive, but in flashbacks we see that he had largely moved on after Mona had died. He wasn’t in what we might call a “good place”, but he didn’t appear to actively be trying to destroy himself. In fact, the premise of him taking the private security job in Sao Paulo is, at least in part, to start over – to escape his old life and move on. “Moving on” then somehow looks like ever-deepening depression, mourning the loves he’s lost, and blaming himself for their deaths when he’s not been responsible for anything but his response to those deaths. Not only does it not make a lot of sense within the story itself, it’s inconsistent with the character that we’ve seen to this point.
Max’s motivation in the third game really does boil down to a paycheck, at least until a woman he’s been hired to protect is kidnapped, at which point he decides he really ought to clean himself up, get sober, and go save her. The argument can finally be made that Max really is responsible for what’s happened to this woman, but the game – and Max – connect the three as if they’re all the same thing. As if it’s simply the fate of any woman with a connection to Max Payne to die. And while Max bears some responsibility for the death of this third woman, it’s her role as a client that detaches her from Max, leaving the pursuit of vengeance justice for her murder feeling hollow. Vengeance for his wife and child, for Mona, was driven by love, and loss. Vengeance doesn’t fit with the latest victim in the Max Payne circle of death when the only connection is a paycheck.
In the end, Max Payne 3 is a mixed bag of great action, middling storytelling, and a confused and inconsistent narrative that feels like it misses the soul of the title character.
What meaning can we draw from all of this? If you’d asked me before playing the third game, I would have said that Max Payne is about love and loss, and the things they can motivate us to do, for good or ill. It’s also about hope, about the pursuit of peace in the face of tragedy. Max himself has no peace while there is no justice for the wrongs done to him and his loved ones, and yet we see him – twice – end his crusade at the point where he feels this specific justice has been done, these specific wrongs have been made right. He is, to that point, driven by a hope that things can be made right, in some fashion. Both games prize justice as restorative to our wellbeing, suggesting that the means are justified by the ends as Max turns himself in and accepts whatever the authorities have in store for him after accomplishing his personal justice and achieving a kind of peace.
The third game in the series? If Max were haunted by the death and destruction he’d wrought in response to the deaths of his loved ones, it would be a better critique of the first two games. (It would also create a bit of a narrative dissonance as the player as tasked with mowing through yet another army of bad guys, so maybe that’s why they didn’t go this route….) And yet Max’s pain is tied specifically to his loss, not his wrath, making the game more about doling out punishment on those who’ve done us wrong, who themselves are stand-ins for the fates that have dealt us grievous wounds in the past. It’s about catharsis rather than justice. Max is a victim throughout the series, but in the first two games that’s used as fuel to fight back, whereas the third treats it as an excuse for self-destruction more than anything else. I think the meaning is supposed to be that grief is messy, that it can drive us to self-destructive ends, but that in the end we can get past it. As the final cutscene rolls on Max sitting at a bar on a tropical beach, we see a man that hasn’t achieved peace, but detachment. He’s also conveniently avoided turning himself in this time around. Maybe this is to make another entry in the series simpler from a narrative standpoint, but it’s also in stark contrast to the previous games, and suggests that dodging responsibility for his role in recent events is Max’s final escape from dealing with his personal demons.
Ultimately then, the first two games tell us that love and loss can be powerful motivators for achieving something and that accepting responsibility for how we achieve that is part of the package, even if the ends justify the means. The third game, meanwhile, tells us that these emotions are instead to be overcome in order to achieve something, and if we can avoid consequences of the actions taken to get there, all the better.