So much for being subtle – Max Payne

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts gave out the first Bafta awards to games in 1998. I’ve already played a few winners, and it’s partly an artefact of staggered releases that means Max Payne is the first game I’ve got to which has its winner’s status highlighted on the front of the box. It won best PC game for 2001, and the PS2 version that made #1 wasn’t released until after its win and could highlight and was the one to become #1. That said, Max Payne also feels like developers Remedy really wanted to win awards in a way that is less precedented.

There is a phenomenon that happens in the reception of games which I think of as This Has Writing!. When the possibilities offered by the mainstream of the medium are frequently constrained, anything that manages to step outside those constraints (in the ‘right’ way) seems to get disproportionate praise just for existing. Even if it’s the exact same game in which you kill the same kind of enemies in the same kind of way underneath. The number one area for overpraising is in foregrounding narrative and themes. In recent years that tends to mean games with prominent messages about, say, racism being bad, or violence being bad. In the day of Max Payne it meant anything which took its story seriously. And Max Payne takes its story very seriously indeed.

Max Payne introduces its levels with cutscenes styled after a graphic novel, with deeply hard-boiled text read out loud by our po-faced hero over lingering still scenes which aim for atmospheric and generally land at boring and artless. Everything is overstated and laid on thickly and clumsily. This is a game whose first part is called The American Dream. In which the weather isn’t cold, but “Outside the mercury was falling fast. It was colder than the Devil’s heart, raining ice pitchforks as if the heavens were ready to fall”. Note the careless repetition of “fall”, one bum note among many. It almost crosses into parody at points, but when Max says that he needs to take us back three years to when the pain started, it’s with a dull sincerity that closes off the possibility.

And so the prologue has you take control of Max Payne and walk through his house, narrative carefully suspended so that however long you take to find the stairs, you always arrive in place just in time to hear Max’s baby and wife get murdered by crazed junkies on a new drug. You get to shoot the junkies to death and see his wife’s sexy corpse. The dead baby seems pretty much an afterthought, the music box lullaby playing in the room a manipulation which would feel crass even if there was any craft to the scene elsewhere. But then, no one here is granted the luxury of any kind of personhood. Even when the scene is revisited in a later meta drug trip dream sequence, that doesn’t change. Max Payne’s wife and baby exist only to die, and to maximise his pain, the better to justify his future killing spree. Nothing more.

There is more to Max Payne than the parts where it tells you its story. That’s a relatively small part of the game, timewise. You spend a lot more of your time on third person shooter gameplay, making your way through places which have a decent sense of reality while channeling you through a straightforward path, shooting people before they can shoot you. Chief among the tools for this is bullet time, inspired by John Woo’s films and a couple of years after The Matrix had popularised the visuals (and the new name) in the West.

Press L2 and you get a limited period of time when everything is in slow motion, allowing you to dodge bullets, except that your own guns fire at normal pace. So you can dodge around the room filling everyone full of bullets, come out of bullet time before your meter runs out, and watch them die, brief cutaways showing their bodies flying in similar cinematic slow motion. The strongest part of the bullet time mechanic as an idea is not even how cool it feels, but the effect it has once your meter runs down and you have to compete on a fairer basis. Trying to get a shotgun blast off before you get hit becomes filled with a new level of desperation that wouldn’t be there if you always had to do it that way.

There is no in-narrative explanation for why Max can slow time and why others don’t get the same benefit of adrenaline. If the idea is that his pain has maxed out so far as to give him special powers, it’s not drawn out. Fair enough; just being able to hide by doorways and see over his shoulder around corners is already a magical ability which might be odd to explain. I don’t experience the gameplay and story as two separate, unconnected things, though. If it was a game about making your way through places and shooting people for no reason I would almost certainly have enjoyed the technical aspect of it more. The highpoint of my enjoyment was the tutorial, before I knew anything about the story. It had less interesting fights but an air of panicked oddness, with payphones ringing to no-one and endless enemies filling otherwise deserted streets.

In the game proper, though, I was always aware on some level of who I was controlling and what I was meant to be feeling, and that I was given only poorly-constructed cliché to do it with. I’ve seen plenty of bad stories in games earlier than this and mostly ignored them, but it felt like I was almost encouraged to do so, and Max Payne was having none of that. It left a dissonance which, unlike Metal Gear Solid, the game didn’t do anything enjoyable with. It wasn’t just directly contradictory moments like Max Payne intoning that a subway train “lit up like a Christmas tree” while on screen it resolutely didn’t which fell flat. The weight placed on the story left it as a dead weight dragging down the whole experience.