Sam Lake Picks His Favorite Moment from Every Remedy Game

ign.com:

Remedy Entertainment makes games packed full of memorable moments. Whether it’s Max Payne’s nightmare fuel dream state levels or Control’s reality-twisting Ashtray Maze, you’ll no doubt have your favourites. So, we thought we’d ask Sam Lake, Creative Director at Remedy, to choose his fondest moments from each of the games he’s worked on in over 20 years at the studio. Here’s what he picked:

My favourite moment in Max Payne goes back to my love of Meta and having that as an element in pretty much all of our games. This is where we did it the first time. There is a moment where Max Payne is pumped full of Valkyr, the drug, and he's hallucinating and we are breaking the fourth wall and he realises that he's in a video game. Well back then, a computer game. Somehow that just felt so funny and exciting as a concept. Still to this day, the fans of the game keep bringing that up as something that kind of blew their minds.

I feel that for Max Payne 2, having gone to study screenwriting in between the games and having more understanding of storytelling, I do really like the kind of the film noir approach or fragmented timeline, and the now that we keep coming back to. In graphic novel terms, it's just Max and Mona facing each other and kissing and him being kind of quite dark in his metaphors about it. Then finally, at the end, it's revealed that we have been kind of fooling you and Mona is actually lying down on the ground and she is dead. I really like this kind of looping narrative and the simple visualisation of a graphic novel and what it gives you and allows you to do.

The bonus would be the TV shows, because that's also been something that we've been carrying with us and evolving and making bigger as an aspect. Just the idea