ESPOO, Finland — Remedy Entertainment have assured fans of the Max Payne franchise that their upcoming remake will finally address longstanding technical problems that caused the original game to slow dramatically in high-octane gunfights.
“I’m glad we can make it up to the fans after all this time,” said Ruuben Koivula, a developer at Remedy. “When we were working on the PS2 and Xbox original hardware, we kept running into this pesky issue where once bullets started flying, the frame rate just chugged to a crawl—particularly if you were diving through the air or blowing someone halfway across the room with a shotgun. I swear we tried everything to fix it, and I know the whole team was very frustrated when we had to ship a game with action sequences far more stylish and satisfying than we’d intended. Thankfully the technology has finally caught up to our ambitions, and now we can deliver a Max Payne game where you turn a corner and are immediately riddled with bullets from seven unseen henchmen, just like we always dreamed.”
Remedy creative director Sam Lake also spoke of his eagerness to fix the flaws of the original.
“Max Payne is a very grounded and mature story,” said Lake, “and the combat was always supposed to reflect that. It wasn’t supposed to be ‘cool’ or ‘fun’, and that annoying bug where you could jump through a window in slow-motion while taking out five bad guys with headshots really muddled that message. I mean, his wife and child were murdered, is that ‘cool’? That’s why in this remake we’re also replacing all of those comic panels we used for story sequences, because this is a serious game for adults. Not little babies who read comic books and want to play as some kind of superhero, impervious to bullets and the passage of time.”
Fans of the Max Payne series have already expressed their enthusiasm for the updates.
“Thank goodness,” began one comment on the Max Payne subreddit, “I’ve always loved these games, but those moments where I was clearing out an entire warehouse full of enemies like a John Wick movie directed by John Woo were a huge black mark on the franchise. Excited to play a less dated, less interesting version of the classic I adored. I hope they make more changes. With the high quality visuals you can get on modern consoles, it’d be a shame if Remedy didn’t give us a brighter, more colorful Max Payne to make the most of that.”
At press time, staff at Remedy had reportedly hired a 20-year-old fashion influencer to be Max Payne’s new facial model.
