The 20-year nostalgia window | Opinion
Rob Fahey
Contributing Editor
Friday 8th April 2022
With the immense success of Capcom's Resident Evil 2 and 3 remakes and Square Enix' even more ambitious Final Fantasy VII remake, it was inevitable that other publishers would start peering back through the decades to see what potential treasures might lie in their back catalogues -- and next up, it seems that it's the turn of Max Payne, whose 2001 outing and its 2003 sequel are set to be remade by original developer Remedy with a budget from publisher Rockstar being described as equivalent to a AAA game.
I've written in the past that this spate of remakes and their ongoing commercial success serve as proof that nostalgia is very, very profitable for a certain era of games right now; that has primarily meant the late 1990s so far, but the early 2000s will come increasingly into focus in the next couple of years, with a roughly 20-year window seeming to be the sweet spot in which consumers reach just the point of middle age where nostalgia for the games of their formative years looms largest.
Max Payne, though, looks trickier to adapt than a lot of other games of the era.
Is this kind of project where the industry's budgets and time are best invested?
Where the likes of Resident Evil and Final Fantasy VII had a style that works pretty well 20 years later -- Resident Evil leaning into a kind of timeless late 20th century Americana, Final Fantasy VII being set in a steampunk fantasy world -- Max Payne is very much a product of the post-Matrix boom in black leather, indoor sunglasses and improbable slow-motion gunplay, all of which looks terribly dated now.
It will take a very deft hand to update the game in a way that both honours people's memories of the originals and
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