As any reader of this blog can tell, I've become obsessed with Remedy Entertainment and their newly-launched Remedy Connected Universe. Even if I'm skeptical of the whole "shared universe" trend that has consumed the entertainment industry ever since the success of The Avengers in 2012, despite it not really working for nearly anyone (and even the MCU has been struggling to maintain audience enthusiasm since 2019's Avengers Endgame... holy crap, how did we have four Avengers movies in seven years?) the extremely unique storytelling sensibility of Remedy's games has me obsessing over their every project (fingers very much crossed that we don't find out that there's some terrible malfeasance behind the scene like what came out about Blizzard in 2021. This is a sort of corollary to "never meet your heroes," which might be "maintain a healthy distance between respect for artists whose work you like and making positive assumptions about who they are as people." I really hope Sam Lake is as cool a person as he comes off in interviews, but let's just say I've been burned in the past.
Anyway, the games that put the studio on the map, of course, were the Max Payne games.
I've never played them.
May Payne came out around the same time that Rockstar published their transformational Grand Theft Auto III, which could arguably be credited with establishing the conventions of the Open World Game style (actually GTAIII came out a couple months later). This was in the PS2 era, which was a golden age of creativity in the games industry but also an era that, frankly, looks like crap compared to more recent console generations due to the technical limitations of the time. But it was the era in which Nintendo, for example, finally went to optical disks instead of cartridges (ironically we're back to cartridges, but the new ones are extraordinarily tiny SD Cards and to be honest, most of my Switch games I just own digitally).
For younger readers who either were too young or not even born, you might not realize the enormous cultural impact of the 1999 movie The Matrix. For a straight cisgender guy like me, the fact that this sci-fi action masterpiece was an allegory for the trans experience (seriously, consider how many times Agent Smith deadnames Neo - I'll concede that it became much easier to read the movie that way after the sibling directors both came out as trans women) flew right over my head. But the visual effects invention that blew people away was Bullet Time, which used a series of still cameras on a green-screen set to allow for ultra-slow-motion and simulated camera "movement" that you could never do with a movie camera. Thus, we got a number of really cool shots of Trinity leaping into the air, the camera spinning around her while the scene was frozen in place, and then kicking a cop in the face, or Neo dodging a barrage of swiftly-fired bullets.
There were actually a couple Matrix video games that, naturally, made use of this slow-motion action, but the games, and the movie's sequels, never totally had the pop culture impact that the original film did. However, parodies of these shots showed up freaking everywhere.
However, while officially licensed Matrix games did crop up (even some made as side-stories with the sequels with the real actors appearing in full motion cutscenes) probably gaming's most famous use of bullet time was in Max Payne.
Here, of course, I need to remind everyone of the title of this post:
I've looked up some synopses and such online of the games - games one and two were in that PS2 era, and a third game that didn't involve Remedy at all (I believe) and was made directly by Rockstar was made in 2012. But I've never played them.
The games, however, are credited with having great storytelling and a lot of weird stuff seen in other Remedy works.
That being said, while Alan Wake, Quantum Break, and Control all have some speculative fiction element (Quantum Break, which I've also not played, seems to be straightforward science fiction, while Alan Wake and Control are in the broader speculative fiction ocean, with Alan Wake closer to the horror pole and Control happily swimming in the deepest depths of the New Weird) I'm given to understand that Max Payne is merely a stylized crime/noir/pulp detective story. There are surreal elements that are due to an unreliable narrator, but there's nothing "paranatural," as our friends at the FBC would say.
Which brings me to the remakes.
Remedy has a lot more experience under their belt now, and their last two games were critical darlings. As such, I wonder to what degree we're looking at remakes that simply recreate the games with modern graphical design and to what extent these are going to be serious remakes - along the lines of what SquareEnix is doing with Final Fantasy VII.
Rockstar is financing the game, but it looks like, according to the press release from two years ago, that this will be allowed to be Remedy's baby. And I wonder if that means that we might see a little more of that RCU stuff in there.
It's no secret that Alex Casey from the Alan Wake games is based on Max Payne (not only was Alex Casey an early name they came up with for Max Payne before they changed it, but in Alan Wake II, Alex Casey is, like Payne, modeled on Sam Lake and voiced by James McCaffrey). Given the fact that the IP belongs to Rockstar, though, it was prudent to come up with a different equivalent. A similar thing appears to have happened with Warlin Door acting as the equivalent of Martin Hatch - while David Harewood did a fantastic job as Door, it's been stated that the original intended casting was Lance Reddick, who had played Hatch in Quantum Break, but Reddick died before he could perform the role.
Sad as it is to use that as a segue, another question to be raised is how they'll approach the vocal performance. James McCaffrey died last year shortly after the release of Alan Wake II.
If the remakes are a faithful recreation of the original titles, it's possible they would just use the old voice lines recorded by McCaffrey over two decades ago. But if the intention is to make something genuinely new of the games, they'd likely need to record new things.
Granted, it's also possible that McCaffrey already did work on the games (or game - I believe the remake is going to be released as a single title, which could imply that it's a more serious reworking, unless it simply means that both games will be sold as a package).
While McCaffrey's contribution to Remedy's success cannot be overlooked - not only did he voice its breakout protagonist, but we got an amazing performance as Zachariah Trench in Control (this time with the model matching his own look) and again as multiple versions of Alex Casey in Alan Wake II (unless you subscribe to the idea that the "fictional" Alex Casey Alan meets in the Dark Place is actually the real Casey with the fictional one's personality taking over because, you know, Dark Place) - at the same time at a certain point you have to just accept that sometimes you'll need to recast.
The big question I have regarding this is whether, if it's truly a remake rather than a recreation or remaster (and it's not a remaster - they are using their proprietary Northlight engine, which did not exist in 2001,) we'll see some additions that connect it to other Remedy games.
While dubiously canonical, the This House of Dreams blog, which told the story of a woman buying a house in Ordinary, ME and finding a shoebox full of poetry by Thomas Zane - some of which is recited by Tom Zane in Alan Wake II, does have a reference to something from Max Payne.
Specifically, in Max Payne (or 2, again I don't know these games) there are episodes of a strange television show that Max can find playing on various TVs (man, Remedy freaking loves this kind of thing) called Address Unknown, in which a man named John is trapped in a strange, shadowy version of New York called Noir York City, and is framed for a murder by his doppelganger, referred to as John Mirra. (Hm, a noir-ish version of NYC? Where have we seen that in recent games...?) But there's a handwritten note on one of the poetry pages shown in the blog that quotes a poem that is quoted in this TV show, connecting, potentially, the RCU to Max Payne - though even there, by connecting to a work of fiction within Max Payne.
It's obvious that Remedy would happily connect all of the games it has worked on - the relationship between Tim Breaker and Mr. Door in Alan Wake II is clearly a gesture toward their work in Quantum Break (whose rights belong to Microsoft).
On a legal level, I wonder to what extent Rockstar will be willing to give Remedy the go ahead to incorporate Max Payne into that shared universe. But then, I also wonder how well Max Payne fits in with all of this stuff.
The Remedy universe is theoretically very much like ours - the paranatural/supernatural seems to be something that most people are unaware of, and of course there's even an internal debate within the FBC (or rather, a scandalous memo that's been circulating) that questions the way the Bureau has been thinking about these strange elements. But Alan and Jesse each had to be initiated into the strangeness of the paranatural creeping in on what was thought to be the normal world (Jesse's eye-opening moment happens long before the events of Control, back when she's 11 years old). Thus, a figure like Max Payne might be having mundane-if-drug-fueled adventures alongside all this strange stuff that's going on.
That said, I also wonder if Max Payne takes place on a sort of other layer of reality. I'm given to understand that in the games (at least the first two) we never see anything in daytime, and it's implied that given all of Payne's trauma and bitterness, we're just seeing things through his subjective point of view.
Anyway, speculation and all. No idea when the remake's expected to come out.
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