Max Payne
Description official descriptions
Max Payne was a police officer of the New York City police. On one terrible day, his wife and newborn daughter were killed by three junkies, who broke into his apartment after having ingested a new designer drug known as Valkyr. After the tragedy, Max quit the police force and joined the Drug Enforcement Administration. Three years later, during a raid on a mafia compound that was reportedly trafficking Valkyr, his best friend and fellow DEA agent Alex is killed, and he becomes the prime suspect in his murder. Now Max is all alone in the cold, snowy night of New York. The mob is out to get him. The police are out to get him. The only way out is with guns blazing, because he has nothing to lose.
Max Payne is a third person shooter stylistically influenced by film noir, "hardboiled" detective stories, and Hong-Kong action cinema. Max can perform rolls and leaps to try and dodge enemy fire. The weapons at his disposal range from baseball bats to Ingram sub-machine guns, grenades, Molotov cocktails, and others. A unique feature of the game is the usage of the so-called Bullet Time - a time-slowing ability that was popularized by the first Matrix movie. Activating the Bullet Time slows down everything that happens around Max (including his own movements), allowing for slow, but precise performance of moves to take care of his enemies. A special meter indicates how much time the effect will last, and how long Max needs to wait until it can be activated again.
Cutscenes in the game are presented as comic book-style graphical panels accompanied by voice-overs.
Spellings
- 英雄本色 - Simplified Chinese spelling
Groups +
- 3D Engine: MaxFX
- BPjS / BPjM indexed games
- Gameplay feature: Time manipulation
- Games that include map/level editor
- Games with Dopefish
- Max Payne series
- PlayStation 2 Greatest Hits releases
- PlayStation 2 Platinum Range releases
- Setting: 1990s
- Setting: 2000s
- Setting: City - New York
- Theme: Illegal Drugs / Narcotics
- Theme: Law enforcement
- Weapon: Pancor Jackhammer
- Xbox Classics releases
- Xbox Platinum Hits releases
Screenshots
Promos
Videos
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Credits (Windows version)
253 People (181 developers, 72 thanks) · View all
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Texture Art | |
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Cinematics | |
[ full credits ] |
Reviews
Critics
Average score: 88% (based on 75 ratings)
Players
Average score: 4.1 out of 5 (based on 415 ratings with 30 reviews)
The Good
No aliens, robots or demons here. Just the gritty, snowed in streets of New York. The story and the game owe a lot of inspiration to the "Die Hard" movies, complete with the renegade cop that can survive the impossible.
Here we start with bullet time that was possibly borrowed from "The Matrix" and implemented in almost every FPS immediately following it. A great feature that lets you aim in slow motion whilst killing the bad guys.
All the action is set against very realistic architecture, with missing tiles, dirty floors, boarded windows. The introductory subway level was especially enjoyable.
The sound was top notch too. The guns had distinctive sounds that let you know what the bad guy was firing at you. Voicework was great too. It was so well done that you never got the sense of bored actors reading a script in to a mic. The music was minimal and well done, providing that additional sense of the solitary figure against the world.
Storywise, It was a little contrived, but with memorable characters. Instead of your usual stereotypical wiseguys, you have different people representing different factions that are making a play for power in the Big Apple. Max finds himself having to take most of them all on at one point or another as allegiances fail.
Gameplay is awesome. I have never had so much fun with a 3rd person shooter before. The random bits of loopiness provided a much needed reprieve from the endless shooting, like the Pink Bird TV show. Using painkillers instead of health packs adds that additional sense of absurdity as Max is being continually shot up.
The graphic novel was an innovative touch, even if it was used to save the developer time and money instead of using ingame scenes. It let the player skip or review completely at their own leisure.
The end game? Fantastic and challenging with a grand payoff. I like that you really don't know who the really bad guy is until the very end.
The Bad
Got to be honest, Wasn't so crazy about the maze parts of the game. I didn't like the blood trail mazes, which were mercifully left out of the sequel.
Otherwise, It was just simply great.
The Bottom Line
Great gaming for low end machines at a budget price. I liked it so much that I bought it again in 2009 after buying it in 2001.
Very much a gaming experience.
Windows · by Scott Monster (986) · 2009
Max Payne is one of the greatest action titles of our time.
The Good
Max Payne was an innovative and unique action title for its time. Sadly, its gameplay draws such as bullet time have been worn and torn so bad that if you describe Max Payne to a modern gamer who missed it first time around they'll simply go 'meh, its been done.' Even I for awhile was so worn out from games with bullet time and "John Woo style" gameplay mechanics that I dismissed Max Payne as dated. But a recent playthrough proved to me that this game is just as good as it ever has been.
For the year 2001, Max Payne was an absolutely eye popping game. These were the early days of full 3D acceleration, yet MP actually looked better than almost every other game on the market, better than Unreal, better than Quake 3, and so on. The detail and animations were exquisite, and high poly character models and environments were used to great effect. Its still satisfying to tear a room apart with bullets and as the dust settles make out piles of bodies lying in blood and brass bullet casings.
Developers love to use the term "Cinematic gameplay." This term has been around ever since the early days of CD when a fad of "interactive movies" came about. These interactive movies had little gameplay value and were often very poor. One of the only truly good interactive movies was the revolutionary laserdisc title, Dragon's Lair and it still had little 'play' value but it was saved by an entertaining story and visuals. But when the developers at Remedy called Max Payne a cinematic experience, they weren't bullshitting around this time. This is as close as you will get to being in an action movie you can actually interact with. Somewhere between "Sin City" and... well, John Woo movies the game is a third person shooter that allows you to use various weapons as well as the now cliche Bullet Time. But even after the glut of bullet time games, Max Payne is still one of the few games that does it right. It can really save your hide, and it looks cool seeing all the bullets, droplets of blood, pieces of plaster, all in slow motion and the "Shoot dodge" moves, which allows you to do slides, jumps, etc. to dodge while shooting in bullet time is still cool and the tight controls make it intuitive and fun. A sort of trademark of 3D realms, you can interact with most objects in the game whether they are important are not, and it is encouraged as you never know when you will find that extra bullet or the much needed health pack (Or in this game, pain pills. Why do so many games interpret pain medication as health? I suffer from arthritis and have pain pills, and sure it helps the pain but it doesn't heal me) and of course there are various jokes or evidence pieces that will help the story come together.
Speaking of the story, Max Payne tells a good one. It's done in a kitschy Noir style, and while this method of story telling as well as the voice acting can be somewhat silly at times, once you get used to it there's a great story that unfolds gracefully and has many satisfying twists and turns.
Guns sound realistic and are fun to shoot.
The AI isn't a push over. Although they are scripted, they can fight back well and are pretty harsh and brutal at times. Bullet time can sometimes be the only way that you can trump a gaggle of baddies, Remedy definitely realized that even a cop isn't going to be superman even if Bullet Time is a somewhat strange power when taken in or out of context.
The MaxEd tool available for the game is surprisingly easy to use and both my wife and I have made some homebrewed levels and campaigns, and it doesn't require a ton of hard coding knowledge to make a well detailed level.
After beating the game, various new modes are unlocked and they are more than just tougher difficulty levels. They change the game in various ways, and there's even a mode built for speed runners called New York Minute. If you're into speed running, try New York Minute, just prepare for the game to hold your balls in a vice grip because its pretty damn tough. You have to beat every level in only a minute per each one. Its hard as hell, but very rewarding when you can successfully beat a level. These modes give the game plenty of replay value.
The Bad
The game is relatively short. While it may seem lengthy by today's ridiculously short standards, the game will only take you about 11 hours to beat.
The game can be frustratingly hard at times. The box claims to have adaptive difficulty adjustments to make the game easier or harder based on how you are doing, but I have noticed no such thing. Quick save is your best friend here.
As good as the graphics are for the time, they are lacking in one area: Facial animation. It's strange that they wouldn't have it, the game uses skeletal animation, you can tell by various animations and the way fingers realistically move and animate. Yet the characters faces are painted on, and its kinda creepy when they talk and their faces don't move. Remedy could've easily just made .gif files and changed the faces in cinematics if they didn't want to go through the trouble of using their skeletal animation system for full facial animation, and they DO use this effect as Max's face contorts in pain upon death as do the bad guys. Its disappointing, and as I said, kinda creepy how the faces never move and it reminds me of the way people talked on the Nintendo 64.
The voice acting and dialogue can seem hammy and somewhat stupid. "Pain killers: Take away the pain, leave the hurt." What the hell does that mean? Sometimes it uses its "Noir" style a little too much and the descriptions are often silly and sometimes when you'd expect a character to emote realistically, just another cheesy Darth Vader "NOOOO" voice happens. You get used to it eventually, but its still somewhat annoying.
The Bottom Line
Max Payne is still an awesome shoot 'em up and a thrilling third person shooter. It may seem short, but it will keep you in the game at all times and is fun throughout. Its also one of the few games with bullet time that actually still makes it feel fun and unique, but that's most likely because it was the first game to use it. It looks cool and plays cool, and its got a good story despite some silly acting. If you haven't checked this one out yet, definitely give it a look.
Windows · by Kaddy B. (777) · 2009
One of the most unique gaming experiences to date!
The Good
Max Payne was an innovative game in its own right, bringing the much hailed Bullet Time effect from The Matrix movies into games. I guess this was a gift as well as a curse, since then it has been in some way or another in a lot of games, so props to 3D Realms for being the first to implement it, and implement it well, as the Enter The Matrix game released some years later didn't do it so well. Having said that the Bullet Time effect has become somewhat of a gimmick, but in this game it had legitimate use.
The Bad
The only thing that irked me about the game was that at some parts of the game you had to virtually fluke your way past, as it was that hard. I found myself using the Bullet Time effect quite a lot in the hard parts, which it was designed for, although more often than not I found myself with the "focus meter" empty quite a few times. If your'e looking for a challenging game, here it is!
The Bottom Line
If you want a challenging game to keep you occupied for the weekend (in my case, a full week!), Max Payne will give you hours of fun, as well as hours of pulling your hair out at the sheer difficulty of some parts. Having said that, the game story is more than enough to keep the people with the shortest attention spans coming back for more.
Windows · by James1 (240) · 2007
Discussion
Subject | By | Date |
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XP SP2 | Indra was here (20756) | Jun 4, 2008 |
Trivia
1001 Video Games
The PC version of Max Payne appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.
Advertisement
In England, the game was advertised on hydrants covered with actual yellow police lines with the game's name and slogan on it ("Max Payne - A Man With Nothing to Lose" etc...), just like the game box's cover art.
Bullet time
The origins of bullet time, made famous in the movie The Matrix and as a playable effect in Max Payne, are attributed to Eadweard Muybridge (April 9, 1830 – May 8, 1904), who used still cameras placed along a racetrack to take pictures of a galloping horse.
Cancelled Dreamcast version
Max Payne was initially in development for the Dreamcast up to the point that Remedy demoed the game at E3 in 1998. Despite some more refined character models, the game looks and plays almost identically to the PS2 and Xbox versions of the game.
Development
- Early on the V drug was not only a mind-warping drug, but also body-warping. It fact it made its users grow into hulking giants with glowing green eyes. In fact, early script drafts deal with super soldiers. There were even work in progress screenshots which shows Max fighting these super soldiers. All this was scrapped as it looked silly and was too similar to Sin.
- In order to create the game, the developers from Remedy traveled from Finland to New York to photograph the buildings and streets. You can read about their adventure at the 3D Realms website: http://www.3drealms.com/max/newyork.html
German index
This game was put on the German index on 29.09.2001. A short time afterwards, according to a Take 2 salesman, the planned to publish a "toned down" version of Max Payne. It would be cut so it could get a "12+" rating and they wanted to do a German translation including voiceovers. This would allow them to sell it again since it isn't the same as the banned game and even more, it's localized so more people could enjoy it.
The new box art had a yellow "police line" over or under the MAX PAYNE title on the box which stated it was a toned down version. However, this version got canned.
The ban on the game was eventually lifted.
Inaccuracies
Despite all the "realism" put into the game... The "code numbers" given by NYPD officers are completely wrong, according to an ex-NYPD officer (Rich Laporte of gonegold.com)
Music
The music for the game was made by Kärtsy Hatakka, who is also the singer and bass player for a band called Waltari.
References
- The game features some humourous moments. In one of the earlier levels, there is a room off one of the ledges outside a building. Inside is a guy lying on the ground with a stake in his back, and the letters "BUFF" (with obvious reference to Buffy the Vampire Slayer) scrawled in blood next to him. Max passes a comment along the lines off "I don't even want to know what happened here."
- In another level, you need a password to get into a laundry room. After finding a low-life to help you out, stand off to the side while he tries to get you in. He's given a first name and asked to give the full name before they'll open the door. The name he has to give is "John Woo", director and king of slow-motion action sequences in movies, an obvious inspiration for the developers of Max Payne.
- At one point in the game, Max comes across a television show speaking about the Aesir Corporation, and how they are becoming another monopoly like Microsoft. However, because Microsoft is a copyrighted name, the television gives a bit of static when Microsoft is spoken, and the graphic novel displays "*static*" instead of Microsoft.
- The Dopefish (an enemy from Commander Keen 4, the Dopefish is usually put into games as an easter egg) appears in Max Payne.
- In the room immediately after Alfred Woden's office, if you shoot a picture off the wall, you'll find a switch. Pressing it will open a secret passage to a room with a Star Trek parody.
- At some point you will pass by a TV in which the images show a familiar red-curtained room and a flamingo, and the accompanying dialog is all in Twin Peaks style. The music has that hip TP jazzy sound. A man's voice talks about his "evil twin," which of course ties in with the dopplegangers of Twin Peaks. The flamingo's speaking style sounds much like the Little Man in Twin Peaks dream sequences. The flamingo may be a reference to Wild Palms, which included flamingos and is sometimes compared to Twin Peaks. Elsewhere, another TV shows a soap opera with events that closely parallel events in the game; this 'soap opera device' was used often on Twin Peaks. During the Twin Peaks parody portion, the flamingo’s speech is distorted and it is impossible to understand what it’s saying except its final line: “The Flesh of Fallen Angels”, a sort of recurrent motif along the game.
- Of all the various pop culture references found throughout the game, there is one that probably escapes the notice of most players. In the tutorial level, take a look at the Tar Cafe signs. Their address is listed as "604 All Your Base Are", a reference to the poorly-translated intro of Zero Wing.
- In the Ragnarock club there are references to the supernatural horror literature of H. P. Lovecraft - the so called Cthulhu Mythos. One of Jack Lupino's books is titled Necronomicon, and one of his personal "spells" mention the name "Cthulhu" as one of the dark gods that he invokes.
- In Part I, Chapter Six, Max Payne enters a small flat. There is a gun lying on the counter, and a gangster can be heard whistling in the toilet. The toilet doors are locked tight, unless the player picks up the gun, which makes the adversary flush the toilet and come out. This is a reference to Quentin Tarantino's cult movie Pulp Fiction: (Pulp Fiction spoiler) This area closely resembles the scene of Vincent Vega's death, when Butch sneaks into his apartment and shoots Vic with his own gun which he left on the counter in the kitchen.
- In the first level, Roscoe Street Station, Max overhears two thugs talking. After a moment of conversation or two, a phone rings. The ring tone is The Ecstasy of Gold from the film The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, composed by Ennio Morricone.
References: Self
- In the skyscraper mission, in one of the elevators, if you stay and listen, you will hear some guards talking about how it would be cool if you could see your moves in slow motion. The guard concludes by saying that he will name this effect Bullet-Time.
- In one part of Max Payne, the graphic novel jokes about Max being a game (this happens in one of the nightmare sequences).
- Another humorous moment... In Part 1, Chapter 2 "Live from the Crime Scene", you finally made your way into the bank vault, and the alarm is blaring. If you shoot the alarm (thus silencing it), Max will thank you.. The same happens at one point in the hotel: you must ride an elevator playing some cheesy elevator music. Shoot out the speaker and Max will thank you.
- Max Payne features a lot of Remedy employees as characters in the game, including screenwriter Sam Lake as Max Payne himself. This led to a very weird E3 2001 showing of the game, since Sam Lake was at GOD Games´ Promised Lot along other members of Remedy with a demo. Everybody was a bit disoriented by seeing Max Payne on screen and his real-life counterpart talking about the title right next to it.
- In Part 1, Chapter 6, when you're chasing Vinnie, there is a billboard for Captain Baseball-Bat Boy, the comics you see throughout the game.
Version differences
The PS2 version doesn't allow you to quick save during a level unlike the PC and Xbox versions.
Awards
- Gamespy
- 2001 - PC Action Game of the Year (Readers' Vote))
- 2001 - Best Gimmick of the Year (for bullet time)
- PC Gamer
- April 2005 - #41 in the "50 Best Games of All Time" list
Information also contributed by AkibaTechno, Archagon, DarkBubble, dasfatso, David Sky, Dreamweaver, Dr. M. "Schadenfreude" Von Katze, Erik Niklas, festershinetop, Juan Pablo Bouquet, Juguryo, JPaterson, Karthik KANE, Kasey Chang, MasterMegid, PCGamer77, phlux, Samuel James Vince and Scott Monster
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Related Sites +
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3D Realms Site
The official 3d Realms/ Apogee Website -
A Rock-Solid Hero for a Rock-Solid OS
An Apple Games article about the Macintosh version of Max Payne, with commentary being provided by Art Director Saku Lehtinen (July, 2002). -
Max Payne
The official Max Payne website -
Max Payne
3D Realms official Max Payne website -
Max Payne Fan Site
Tips, cheats, screenshots, modifications and links. -
Official Webpage (Mac)
The official product page for the Mac version of Max Payne on the publisher's website, which provides a trailer, character information, a profile of the game itself, and purchasing information, among other such particulars. -
Payne Reactor
A fan site dedicated to Max Payne - Mods, Levels, Total Conversions, Tutorials, Forums, Cheats, etc. -
Sound fix for Max Payne and Vista.
A clever person fixed a bug with Max Payne not playing music and dialogue in Vista. Vista doesn't support the sound file formats used for the playback.
Identifiers +
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Contributors to this Entry
Game added by Derrick 'Knight' Steele.
Xbox added by Brian Hirt. PlayStation 3 added by Charly2.0. Xbox 360 added by karttu. iPad, PlayStation 4, iPhone added by Sciere. Macintosh, Android added by Kabushi. Xbox One, Xbox Series added by Eufemiano Bullanga.
Additional contributors: Macintrash, Xantheous, Kasey Chang, Unicorn Lynx, Jony Shahar, Jim Fun, Frenkel, Sciere, Scott Monster, Zeppin, Patrick Bregger, FatherJack, 64er.
Game added July 19, 2001. Last modified April 4, 2024.