It's like Max just has an inate ability to be really cool. In practice, you can kind of do it whenever you like, with the click of a button. You can't do it indefinitely, and there's a cooldown timer - but it's pretty generous. 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. And you can listen in to the idle bitching of your enemies before you round the corner and they notice you, at which point someone will yell, "IT'S PAYNE!" just before you drop into slow motion and watch bullets drift gently past you. The writing also contains lines like, "The sun set with practiced bravado", which is absolutely incredible. The cutscenes are done as comic book panels, which were clearly very fun to shoot the stills for (Max's face is provided by real life person Sam Lake, now Remedy's creative director, and is constantly scrunched up in an, "I DIDN'T ASK FOR THIS!" grimace that Lake recreated today). Eventually, Max goes undercover in the Punchinello (another pun) crime family, and due to a hilarious mishap in a subway station, finds himself on the run from both the Mafia and the cops.Īs a whole, it's the best blend of goofy and ridiculous. His life has no meaning, and you can tell because he stops wearing suits and starts wearing a shitty necklace. Max is a New York City cop who comes home one day to find his wife and infant daughter have been murdered by tweakers, and jones the DEA to go after the bad drugsmen. There are other reasons to go back and play Max Payne, obviously, and I'd recommend it if you never have (it's currently, like, £2 on Steam as part of a sale, but is normally only just over a fiver). 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 in Red Dead Redemption 2 a coupla decades later. In an interview with IGN in 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."
Though really, the influence goes back to John Woo's absolutely fantastic action movies, which you should watch all of right now.
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.
Bullet time is what Max Payne (a pun) is most famous for, of course.
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