Max Payne shoots to the heart of how video games work
Ahead of the tenth anniversary of Max Payne 3 in May, we’ll be publishing one essay from our Features Editor Grace Benfell once a month on each game in the series.
The first video game is both hazy and contentious territory, but the medium’s origin, just like that of computers, is wrapped up in military history. The first iterations of digital computers, at least as we now understand them, were developed as code breakers during World War II. The massive research computers and flight simulators, such as those at MIT, were built because of military funding. Spacewar!, arguably one of the first computer games, came from MIT’s hacker culture. From there, it’s easy to trace a line from the military industrial complex to video games as they are. It’s a fundamental relationship that continues to this day in both overt and gestural ways.
Released 21 years ago in July, Max Payne sits between what video games were and what they are. On one hand, it’s a shooter, as indebted to military tech as any shooter must be. But Max is alone, not even a super soldier, but a broken, pathetic man with good aim and a lot of luck. When the game’s ultimate villain is a grinning representative of the military industrial complex, it’s hard not to feel that this grimy genre piece interrogates itself. At the end of the game, when Max climbs a massive corporate skyscraper, he is climbing into the heart of video games themselves.
Max Payne is of its time. Its influences are steeped in cultural material of the early 2000s: Sin City, neo-noir, John Woo, and The Matrix. The game’s central twist is “bullet-time.” As Max dives, time slows down, allowing him to pick his shots and dodge attacks, just like the heroes of the aforementioned cinematic examples.
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