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Happy 20th birthday to the original bullet time superstar Max Payne20 years of slow motion runnin' and gunnin'
20 years of slow motion runnin' and gunnin'
Remedy’s firstMax Paynegame turns 20 today, which, most importantly for this article, means I can’t make a joke about how it’s now old enough to do X or Y. 20 is a garbage age for milestones. But I just looked it up and discovered that in America you only have to be 18 to buy a shotgun(what?!). That means Max Payne the game is already old enough to, in slow motion, leap sidways as it fires a shell right into a mob enforcer’s face. I think it’s sort of what Max himself would have wanted. Happy bullet time day to you!
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Bullet time is what Max Payne (a pun) is most famous for, of course. Other games had done slow motion business before, but this incredibly over-the-top neo-noir gunstravaganza was the first one where you went, “Cor, I’m just like Neo off of The Matrix!” while you did it. Though really, the influence goes back to John Woo’s absolutely fantastic action movies, which you should watch all of right now.
In an interview with IGNin 2003, Petri Järvilehto, then Remedy’s lead game designer, said that, “Even in the early prototypes for the game, we were thinking that slow-motion would have to be an integral gameplay element since it was simply so cool to run down a corridor with two berettas firing in slow-mo.”
It is! And its influence was such that if you go back and play the original Max Payne today you can basically draw a line from Max Payne’s bullet time in 2001 to the Dead Eye inRed Dead Redemption 2a coupla decades later.
This is no way to open a door, Max
Perhaps the most surprising thing about revisiting it now is that bullet time in Max Payne isn’t really a special special power in the same way it is now. You can’t do it indefinitely, and there’s a cooldown timer - but it’s pretty generous. In practice, you can kind of do it whenever you like, with the click of a button. It’s just a thing you do. It’s like Max just has an inate ability to bereally cool.
Compare that to your Red Dead Redemption 2 Dead Eye, where you can target baddies in slow motion before hitting the trigger to shoot ‘em all in succession. It’s very satisfying, but it’s not quite as intimate, you know? And to refill your Dead Eye you need to snarf down tobacco like normal coloured teeth are going out of fashion, so there’s a more economic limit to your own personal God mode. Cowboy games love bullet time, incidentally; a version of it crops up in the Call Of Juarez series and Gun, the latter a personal nostalgic favourite of mine.
SUPER! HOT!
Because that’s kind of what it is in Max Payne. It’s not just cool, it’s essential to playing the game. Max is pretty squishy when compared to your average present day action protagonist, so if you don’t use and master the bullet time you’ll die pretty quickly. He’s just a Noo Yoik cop, who’s well good at shooting two berettas at the same time! He ain’t no Superman! In 2018, Laketold ScreenRantthat Remedy won’t be making another Max Payne game, which is fair enough. They’re busy making other cool shit like Control, after all. Remedy did make Max Payne 2, where bullet time had some layers added to it, before the series was handed over for good to Rockstar, who didMax Payne 3in 2012.
But I don’t think anyone will ever forget the original. The game that started it all. The first one to make us feel like a cool, down on his luck hero who was nevertheless preturnaturally great at killing people. IT’S PAYNE!
