I was sitting at work today like the diligent employee that I am, and I got a Discord notification where the only thing I could see was the first few words of a link. The link was to a tweet from Remedy Entertainment stating that they were remaking Max Payne and Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne. Needless to say, I was excited to see this. We’re getting a remake of two of my favorite games of the early-2000s with funding from Rockstar Games, but they’re giving it to the franchise’s developers, Remedy Entertainment.

Of course, I’m still excited hours later, and I can’t think of a better time to go back to the games that started the franchise. I played them on PlayStation 2 years ago, and while you can still absolutely play them that way, I’ve got them and am replaying them on PC, and through a mod such as Ultimate Max Payne, they run like a charm. 

If you’ve somehow lived under a rock for the past two decades, the story of Max Payne follows the titular character, a former New York City Police Department officer turned Drug Enforcement Agency, three years after his wife and daughter’s murders. While working undercover within the Punchinello crime family, Max is subjected to a whole slew of chaos that would carry his story through a sequel, and eventually a third game nearly a decade after the second. The second game in the series takes place two years after the events of the first, with a cast of returning characters, and more of what made the first game great. 

Max Payne was a wonderful take on the third-person shooter genre, and it helped establish new ideas that we tend to take for granted. While the game was released a couple of years after The Matrix hit theaters, Max can take advantage of the bullet-time concept that the movie popularized. This is such an addicting feature, and I especially love coming to a corner and activating the feature, aptly removing the people in the room from this plane of existence.

The game’s cutscenes utilize a graphic novel approach to storytelling, which underlines how incredible the gritty atmosphere of the game is. Drawing inspiration from The Matrix was one thing, but the game taps into the film noir genre of movies, adding a bleak outlook to everything just like the movies did. 

Whether or not you’ve ever played the Max Payne games, there’s no better time to visit or revisit them than right now. It doesn’t appear that even Remedy Games knows when the remakes are coming, and frankly, I’m okay with that. These are wonderful games, and if I somehow haven’t done it subtly, this is me telling you in the most straightforward way I can: PLAY THESE GAMES!

Max Payne is available on PC via Steam, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S (the latter two through backward compatibility), and even iOS and Android. Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne is available on PC via Steam, PlayStation 2, Xbox, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S (the latter two, again, through backward compatibility).