There are evil mobsters with unconvincing Jersey accents that could have been extras in The Sopranos. There is a “mandatory” capture-and-escape level seen previously in Half-Life, Deus Ex, and others. Films of the era had popularized nonlinear storytelling, including Pulp Fiction, Fight Club, and Memento, and Max Payne starts with the ending, more or less completely stripped of context for maximum dramatic effect. The story is a greatest hits of crime and noir staples, from the maverick cop archetype of Inspector “Tequila” Yuen in John Woo’s Hard Boiled, to the double and triple crosses seen in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (both sources that Max explicitly references in his monologues). Either way, it’s an excuse for some of the most joyfully ridiculous metaphors and one-liners ever committed to a video game script – numerous puns on Max’s preposterous name, for example, or the deadpan delivery of phrases as absurd as, “I don’t know about angels, but it’s fear that gives men wings.” The narration is so heavy with purple prose that it’s unclear whether to treat it as a parody of hard-boiled crime and noir fiction or an overly earnest attempt to be part of that canon.
The assignment leads him on a bloody climb through the hierarchy of New York’s mobster families, narrated with pitch-perfect sourness by James McCaffrey and delivered through a mix of graphic novel-style panels, in-engine cutscenes, and gameplay voice-over. Max Payne is a self-proclaimed “man with nothing to lose,” a young New York ex-cop who deliberately takes a dangerous undercover assignment with the Drug Enforcement Agency after his wife and baby are murdered by junkies high on a new drug. And yet it remains one of the most impressive sophomore efforts from a young studio and one of the standout games from the era. There is a strange brew of youthful naivety and borderline sociopathy in a narrative replete with tropes and clichés, while the gameplay trades on the cultural zeitgeist established by The Matrix two years earlier. Going back to it now, particularly in light of its sequels and legacy, feels like picking up a piece of the industry preserved in amber.
Max Payne will celebrate its 20th anniversary next month.
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