Here's How A Game Designer Became Max Payne

In case you missed it earlier today, in news that I can’t imagine anyone saw coming, Rockstar have announced that they’re going to be remaking the first two Max Payne games for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. 

It’ll be Remedy (the team behind the original games) in charge of the development, and will “be in line with a typical Remedy AAA-game production”, so in theory, they’re going to be amazing. The first Max Payne game released all the way back in 2001, with the sequel following on a couple of years later in 2003, and proved to be hugely popular, but you may not know that the titular character himself is basically a doppelgänger of Remedy’s creative director, Sam Lake.

We spoke to Sam Lake himself to find out exactly how he ended up becoming Max Payne - take a look below.

“If you look at the graphics when we started working on [the game] in say ’96, all the textures back then were hand drawn, and so even if there was a photo involved, an artist would do their take on it,” Lake explained. “The early versions of the character didn’t really look like me, or was in any way recognisable.”

Obviously though, that changed when later down the line, the game was updated to use photos as textures, giving Max Payne the face we all know and love, courtesy of Lake: “I was like ‘huh, you can kind of recognise me from that’, but we were quite far [into development],” he told us. “Happy that we did it,” he added.

It remains to be seen if the upcoming remakes will follow suit and also have Max Payne be a clone of the dev - if he thought it was recognisable back then, just imagine how uncanny a resemblance they could produce now with modern day graphics. There’s been no release window given yet for the remakes, so we’ll just have to stay tuned.