I never played Max Payne. Back in the day, this being the year 2000 (which, as an elder millennial, I have a hard time processing the fact that it was nearly a quarter of a century ago - I saw a meme at some point that said "Millennials think 1970 was thirty years ago," and that hit hard) Rockstar game out with this game and with Grand Theft Auto 3, a game that arguably launched the "open world" game as we know it now (I'd say largely in the way that the "missions" in that game took place in the same open world space that you could explore outside of the main story).
I have, as this blog can attest, recently finished the second part of Square Enix's remake trilogy of the beloved Final Fantasy VII. Announced long before the first of this trilogy was announced, I think most people expected it to be a pretty direct translation of the older game, but with upgraded graphics and full voice acting.
Instead, what Square did was to re-build the game from the ground up, expanding the game (the entire first game in the trilogy takes place in what is basically the original game's introductory hours, all in the dense and dystopian city of Midgar) and even introducing plot elements that contradict or at least supplement the original's story.
In the last year, I've become an obsessed adherent of Remedy games, for whom Max Payne was their first big hit. I never played it, though. I have a sense of it - the game's ambition was to give an action game the same depth of story that you usually only got in an RPG (you know, like Final Fantasy games) and so it was presented as a big hardboiled detective story involving conspiracies, personal tragedies, and vague references to Norse mythology.
Remedy is a small studio, but their recent successes with Control and Alan Wake II have given them a bit more resources to work on multiple projects. Aside from AW2's DLC expansions, we know Control 2 is in the works, along with a couple of other projects that I don't think have official names yet, but they're also planning to remake Max Payne 1 & 2.
Notably, Rockstar, which published the original games, made a Max Payne 3 around 2010, but this didn't involve Remedy. Still, the studio was able to secure the rights to remake their original games.
Remedy has also started making forays into a larger connected universe for their games - Control and Alan Wake explicitly take place in the same universe (though it's also a universe in which human thought and perception can overwrite reality, so we might say more broadly "cosmos.")
Remedy's games in this time have also been driven largely by the creative leadership of Sam Lake, their creative director, who is something of an auteur for the games (though I think he's the kind of artist who might not love the idea of a singular author for something as collaborative as a game - I honestly think the fact that Tom Zane refers to himself as an auteur is an indication that we shouldn't trust him). Lake was both the main writer for the Max Payne games as well as the model whose likeness the character's face was based on in the first game (though not in 2 or 3 - actually, 3 uses voice actor James McCaffrey as the model - something that Lake has said in retrospect he felt stupid for not thinking to do with the original. It just wasn't a common thing back then to do that with voice actors).
While not officially canon in the Remedy Universe, because of the fact that Rockstar owned the rights to the game, the character and stories of Alex Casey in Alan Wake are basically just Max Payne. We find out in Alan Wake II that Casey is actually a real person, and that Alan's popular novels were inspired by Alan's visions of Casey's work, which Alan thought was just his active imagination. Notably, like in the original Max Payne game, Casey's physical model is Sam Lake and his voice actor is James McCaffrey, making the connection to Max Payne all but explicit.
So, that brings me to the remakes.
I think it's reasonable to assume that the remakes will be just that - more along the lines of the remakes we've seen of Demon's Souls or Shadow of the Colossus (which were both done by the same studio, I believe,) and which are basically just faithful recreations of the games with stunningly well-done updated graphics (I remember seeing Demon's Souls paused in photo mode and realizing that the individual rain drops in the Storm King fight seemed to be animated separately).
But given the audacity of Square Enix's approach to remaking Final Fantasy VII, I almost wonder if we'll see some substantial changes to these games.
One of the biggest challenges, though, is that James McCaffrey died not long after the release of Alan Wake II. His voice is such a huge part of what makes Max Payne Max Payne, and so I imagine it would be very difficult to find someone to replace him to record new dialogue (though I'd far prefer casting a sound-alike over the ghoulish notion of recreating his voice via AI).
If the plan is just to remake the games as they were but with modern graphics and perhaps tweaked and refined gameplay, it might be easy enough to just use the original recordings and maybe clean them up.
On the other hand, I personally have an appetite for Remedy's particular brand of weirdness and would be excited to see a connection made in these games to the larger RCU.
And I say that despite being very skeptical about the idea of shared universes. The MCU was such a huge success in this field (at least up through Endgame) that it was kind of disheartening to see how so many other franchises failed to actually make it work (DC, theoretically the franchise that should theoretically have the easiest time replicating it, basically couldn't make it work and now seems to be having more success by jettisoning the idea of a shared universe.) But I guess I don't find it grating with Remedy for two reasons:
One is that the properties here are new enough that it doesn't feel like they're being shoehorned together. Control was written from the ground up to coexist with Alan Wake, even while it very much stands on its own. Even dating back to the "This House of Dreams" blog, Remedy was playing with the idea of a government agency that looked into paranormal happenings (as late as Quantum Break they were the "Bureau of AWE" - I like FBC better).
And that ties into the second reason: that this is really inspired not by the recent MCU-style shared universe, but borrows instead from Stephen King's oeuvre, in which each story introduces its own rules, but there's an implication of an overlap - that Danny Torrance's Shine is actually the same as Alain John's "Touch" in the Dark Tower series. There's literal overlap, like how the protagonist of 11/22/63 meets a couple of the kids in the Loser's Club from IT back in the 1950s, but with few exceptions, you don't really feel like you have to have read everything King has written to get what you're reading.
But I also get that my lack of prior experience with Max Payne might make me more open to changes - much as my lack of experience playing Final Fantasy VII has allowed me to feel fine with most of the changes the remake trilogy has made to the story and even gameplay (while I've been frustrated by Square's abandonment of traditional turn-based combat ever since Final Fantasy XII, I actually love the way that the remake trilogy's combat work).
In other words, I'd be happy to see the plot of these noir/hardboiled stories tweaked to imply a connection to the broader RCU. Maybe that makes me a philistine or a rube. But I've also seen even just in the gap between Alan Wake and Alan Wake II how Remedy has evolved in their skill at telling stories through games, and while I think game preservation is a crucial goal that is woefully underserved, I think that's what a remaster is for, not a remake.
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