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For those that are interested in learning even more about the world and development of Take-Two's runaway hit Max Payne, IGN's Action Vault has recently published an exhaustive overview of the game. Covering the history, premises, and various influences of Max Payne, this special report reveals much about the design philosophy of this gritty action title and gives players a clearer picture of the game overall.

One of the more interesting tidbits is that the popular Tomb Raider series did much in influencing Max Payne, though not necessarily in ways one might suspect. Rather than using Tomb Raider as an example, the design team did everything they could to make sure that the character Max Payne could in no way be compared to Lara Croft.

An influence that the team did attempt to use as an example is the work of John Woo, Hong Kong action movie master. While many people point to The Matrix as Max Payne's point of influence, Scott Miller of 3D Realms is quick to point out that Max Payne started development before the release of The Matrix, and in fact draws heavily upon John Woo's films for ideas and influence.

The idea for the slow-motion effects that have made Max Payne so famous also came about in an interesting way:

In the game's final form, slow motion plays a pivotal role, but this was actually not the case at one point in development until the teams realized the great potential it had. "Early in the game's design, we had the idea of modeling bullets as true physical objects traveling at real-life speeds through the game space," relates Miller. "At the time, this idea was designed to further enhance the realism that we wanted the game to exude. Remedy implemented this idea beautifully, and seeing it in slow motion, as a test, convinced everyone that slow motion needed to be a bigger part of the game experience. It all flowed from there to what we have in the finished game." In addition to its gameplay function, slow motion has also been incorporated into the occasional internal cutscene for added effect. Such moments are seen when Max finishes off certain predetermined characters.

The rest of the story covers such aspects as Max Payne's gameplay, audio features, and storyline. Anyone interested in more information on Max Payne should
definitely check out the rest of IGN's special report. As far as the Max version of Max Payne goes, publisher MacSoft has noted that Take 2 itself is responsible for the Mac port, with a current projected release date of April 2002.

IGN Action Vault - Max Payne Special Report

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