Max Payne

Max Payne brought a cinematic noir detective story to PC in 2001, about a New York cop whose wife and daughter were murdered by unknown assailants. The hero sinks into the underworld surrounding a synthetic drug called Valkyr, loses his badge and his name, and fights his way through a series of shootouts across a frozen, wintry New York against the people pulling the strings. The narration carries a bitterly ironic first-person monologue full of similes and metaphors, and instead of animated cutscenes, the story is advanced through static comic-book panels with voiced narration. The result is a game that feels like an interactive version of a dark crime novel.

Mechanically, everything is built around bullet time, the ability to slow down time while still aiming with the mouse at normal speed. Paired with that is the sideways diving jump with mid-air shooting, which became the game's iconic move. The levels are narrow, precisely designed arenas full of wooden furniture, barrels, and glass surfaces that shatter into pieces during a firefight. The arsenal ranges from pistols and shotguns to submachine guns and a sniper rifle, ammunition is always just tight enough, and the game forces the player to plan which room to storm and in what order to take down opponents. Several feverish dream sequences break up the shooter's rhythm and remain among the genre's most memorable scenes to this day.

Technically, it was a showcase of what PCs of the time could do: a custom engine with dynamic lighting, dense particle effects, and scanned faces, with the studio's own screenwriter lending his likeness to Max. The audio rests on a spare, mournfully sounding main theme and the raw noise of wind and city. Critics received the game very well, and bullet time became a commonly used mechanic in action games and beyond within just a few years. Today Max Payne is shorter, more straightforward, and in places brutally difficult, but thanks to its very austerity and style it has aged far better than most of its contemporaries, and it runs without trouble on modern PCs.