While Remedy set about introducing its high-flying particles to early Havok physics, Lake was left to wrestle with the more obvious dilemma: now what? What next for the cop who had destroyed the world of his enemies – just as they’d destroyed his – only to find himself stood atop the rubble? In the darkly titled The Fall Of Max Payne, we learned the answer: if life couldn’t get any worse for Max, it could certainly get more complicated. Did the introduction of Mona Sax, the femme fatale in a grander, murkier and more open sequel, pose problems for a story that was, at its best, about the isolation and disintegration of just one man?

“I did worry, and I did struggle,” Lake admits. “The main reason was Max’s narration, his internal monologue. That was avery important tool to tell the story, maybe the most important one. Through it, we get to know what Max thinks and feels. He’s not an empty vessel. I did want to switch to Mona [she later became a playable character] – in fact, had there been more time, it would have been nice to add levels where you play as Vinnie, Vlad and Bravura – but it was problematic. In the end, Max frames those sequences with his narration, saying that he doesn’t know exactly what happened, or what Mona did, but it must have been something like this. In other words, when you are playing Mona, you are actually experiencing Max’s guess of the events.”



Boasting an understandably superior lead performance from Timothy Gibbs, a professional actor, the game reviewed well, ported admirably to PS2 and Xbox, and has since helped the series achieve sales of over seven million copies. But not everyone allowed the drama and spectacle to excuse the unwavering action epitomized by Max’s slow-motion leaps. This magazine, notably, scored the first game six out of ten.

“We’re firm believers in focusing on something,” insists Mäki. “I’m not sure you could do it quite so focused nowadays, as people’s expectations have grown, but it was deliberate. Deliver an experience and deliver it well.” “And we’ve always been very aggressive when cutting stuff out of a game,” says Vanhatalo. “We’ve never been fans of having to backtrack through the level to get the red keycard, for example. That whole 30 seconds thing [a reference to Halo’s self-professed recycling of action moments] is often called the core loop – and that was our core loop. A good recent example would be something like Call Of Duty 4: you pretty much do the same thing but with a different gun in a different place, but it nails the core loop so perfectly that you never tire of it.”

Now, of course, Max Payne has another new face – that of Mark Wahlberg, star of Fox’s movie adaptation which, on the outside, stays true to the game’s themes, characters, setup and art. After the misfire of Hitman, the third-act collapse of Silent Hill and the wanton awfulness of Uwe Boll’s entire canon, the staff at Remedy – who found out about the movie via the internet, having sold the option rights back in 2001 – remain open to the possibility of it actually being, well, all right. “It’s only natural that we haven’t been involved,” says Lake. “We’re a small developer – we want to concentrate on what we know best. It is nice, though – the feeling that something you’ve created was interesting enough for people to do their interpretation. Games and movies are very different; some things work and some don’t. We’re looking forward to seeing it.”