Backtracking is a blogging project that I’m embarking on in 2024 in which I will play one game from each year since I was born. My goal is to engage with games I’ve never played and divert some of my attention away from new releases and towards older titles. I hope to cross off some major backlog items, learn more about the influences and intertexts that informed the games I grew up with, and practice my analytical skills. I’m using US release dates as the relevant year for my selections.
Why I Chose This Game
Max Payne might not be the most popular of the classic shooters from the early aughts, and it's likely not the most beloved property from Finnish studio Remedy Entertainment in the wake of their latest successes. But it is one of their earliest titles, beloved for innovative mechanics, and certainly a crucial part of their legacy that's worth exploring.
But more importantly (to me, at least), it's a game I remember my dad playing. I don't know how much of it he played, and I don't think it was a favorite series of his the way Tomb Raider was, but it was in the mix of shooter game boxes that I remember finding by his desk in the early aughts. Unlike Tomb Raider, I don't think he ever suggested that I try Max Payne. Maybe that's because of its brutal opening moments or its more real-life setting and tone. I doubt he'd remember why he never put it in front of me; maybe he did, and I'm the one forgetting.
Regardless, this fuzzy category of "dad games" has a certain gravity in my mind. He doesn't much enjoy shooters nowadays, and has some trouble communicating and remembering things due to some health problems. Sometimes, I feel like playing these games might let me learn something about him that I don't already know.
Going into this, there was really only one thing I knew about Max Payne: it revolved around doing dramatic bullet-time diving manuevers while gunning down opponents. Something so firmly rooted in a turn-of-the-millennium aesthetic novelty seemed like it would be fun to explore today.
What I Thought
Max Payne, stripped to its barest components, is a game about diving for cover while desperately spraying bullets at a room full of enemies. It's about pushing through armies of mobsters and cops in a desperate quest for revenge, barely hanging on, doing whatever it takes to unravel the machinations behind the violence that upturned Max's life. Max still has his wry wit, but revenge is what keeps him going: dive after desperate dive, betting that he can kill you before he hits the ground and has to pick himself back up.
These diving bullet time manuevers make up the core mechanical conceit of the game. It does certainly stretch itself a little thin by the end, but combined with a variety of weapons, it tends to be pretty fun and unique throughout. Most of Max's weapons have very poor accuracy, so the diving and dodging serves as a mechanism of tipping the odds in your favor. It makes Max a smaller target and it helps him keep sustained gunfire on his enemies as the slowed-down seconds tick by. The combination of desperate lunges towards cover, bullet-time slow-mo, and low accuracy weapons makes for a messy and grimy struggle, an apt canvas for a story about crime, drugs, and revenge.
The writing, credited to Sam Lake (now creative head of the studio), is as melodramatic as one might expect, constantly indulging in lurid metaphors and brooding machismo. It's a charming style throughout, never failing to make me smirk even as other aspects of the story wear thin. The plot itself is hard to grasp onto, careening from hunting down mob bosses to stealing weapons caches to uncovering grand government conspiracies. In many ways, Max Payne feels like an enjoyably campy action movie that's got one act too many, eventually dragging itself over the finish line with a brutal gauntlet of a final level that barely ties off it's story (just enough to tee up a sequel) and leaves the melodrama of Max's descent into violence a little bit threadbare.
True to its noir and action movie stylings, Max Payne's writing also treats women poorly and wallows too often in the violence done to them (typically intending to reinforce Max's own trauma, no less). I'm caught halfway between "it comes with the territory, I had no reason to expect better" and "I was hoping for more from this studio, even at the time". The storytelling in general is so over-the-top, so full of scenery-chewing mobsters and Max's own gritty narration that the misogyny probably arises primarily from an exaggerated commitment to established genre tropes, but it was still exhausting after a while.
That said, the aesthetic of the storytelling generally won me over. The plot functions like another aesthetic element, a flurry of tropes and conspiracies that's hard to keep up with. I adore the strange multimedia format that delivers the story in lieu of cutscenes: comic-book-styled sequences crafted from stylized, edited photos of the game's developers (and even their families) posing with props and making exaggerated faces. The panels fade in one by one, fully voiced and narrated immaculately (by the late James McCaffrey) as if told in brooding monologue by Max himself after the fact. Even if the story itself began to dull, the stylish delivery never lost its charm. These comic book panels feel like the game's clearest signifier of Remedy's offbeat, multimedia artistic lineage.
Max Payne released in a time of emerging 3D realism, when even the campiest games had an underlying sincerity and self-seriousness, especially when drawing heavily from film genres. Sure, the game knows it's pretty goofy, but it also knows that it's pretty fucking awesome, and it isn't trying to pretend it thinks otherwise. In the end, I'm pretty forgiving of this kind of tone, even if I wish it reproduced less of the most eye-roll-worthy qualities of its inspirations. And in case it wasn't clear, bullet time is still cool as hell; there's a reason why it grew to become an action gaming staple, stretching onward from F.E.A.R. all the way to Tears of the Kingdom.
Reflections
Playing some of these old titles that my dad interacted with when I was younger feels like exploring a snapshot of his taste. As I get farther into the aughts with this project, the "dad games" dry up. He kept playing games, but I got older and simply played more of the ones he handed down to me. As I grew to a more appropriate age and more capable player, I also became more voracious and curious. I eventually got brave enough to endure the horror elements that characterized so many shooters in the aughts. I might revisit those games someday, but they don't haunt my backlog.
Max Payne is probably a good sendoff for this type of Backtracking selection, but it certainly feels a little bittersweet. Moving deeper into the aughts, I'll be choosing from games I couldn't get my hands on them, didn't have interest in, or didn't have a console for. Max Payne may be the last of these games that missed me, rather than ones that I missed in pursuit of other things.