“They wanted to see if we were open to lending a top layer to the music for when you hit DEFCON five,” Duzsik said over Zoom, “a potential soundscape for when all hell breaks loose.”Īs HEALTH worked on integrating their own music with the existing score, it became clear the two sides weren’t harmonising. Rockstar had an existing score for Max Payne 3 and hoped HEALTH would provide extra sonic juice. It was only when the two parties got together for a meal in New York that the scope of the project became clear. When the phone rang, Duzsik and his bandmates figured the company just wanted to use a track or two for a Grand Theft Auto V soundtrack – exciting, sure, but maybe not life-changing. The band’s vocalist and guitarist, Jake Duzsik, remembers effectively getting “cold-called” by Rockstar. There's no better encapsulation of the lavish, allegedly $100 million budget that funded Max’s fall into nightmarish middle age than the game's soundtrack, which was made by twenty-something noise music upstarts, HEALTH. “Joel and Booker were presented at relative face value for us just to accept.” “I didn’t see much reflection in those games,” Petit says. Just a year later in 2013, with the releases of The Last of Us and Bioshock Infinite, starring Joel and Booker DeWitt respectively, the genre would revert to type. Rockstar’s title didn’t stray too far from the garden path in its critique, simultaneously revelling in shooter tropes while calling them out, but it nonetheless pushed thematic boundaries alongside military shooter Spec Ops: The Line (whose disappointing sales were also cited as a reason behind Take-Two’s sizeable losses in Q1 2012). While gaming at large still has some way to go in its approach to diversity – the likes of Horizon Forbidden West's Aloy, Returnal’s Selene and Spider-Man’s Miles Morales remain firm exceptions to the rule of the white male protagonist with a thirst for carnage – Max Payne 3 was at least part of a wave of games that questioned what was a well-worn premise even by then. She appreciates the way Rockstar explored the notion that Max, at this point in his life, is “pathetic” referring to him as both “sad and lost… without a place in the world anymore.” “It gives off major midlife crisis vibes.” Petit gave the game a firmly effusive review, but reflecting on it now, pushes her assessment of the character further. “I thought there’s something kind of sad about Max in Brazil,” she told me over Zoom. Max, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt rather than his signature leather jacket, felt anathema to the classic hard-boiled cop of previous entries, as if Rockstar was playing a prank on its bungling, overweight protagonist.Ĭarolyn Petit, associate editor at Gamespot at the time, recalls this strikingly schmucky version of Max. The cinematics are fragmented, filled with disorientating hard cuts, while garish, glitching blue and green filters are layered over the top of the action intermittently to evoke Max’s alcohol and prescription drug-addled brain. True to this approach, every aspect of the game feeds into Max’s perception of the world. Then, when the genre had reached almost total saturation, Max Payne 3 hit stores.Ī satire and deconstruction of the toxic masculinity that defined so many of its compatriots, Rockstar co-founder and former vice president of creativity Dan Houser somewhat carefully described the game as a “character study” in an email to Polygon. Dead To Rights, Stranglehold, and Wet had all offered focused if forgettable takes on balletic gunplay in the years prior, while Gears of War and Uncharted helped ensure the third-person shooter continued to dominate the glitzy E3 conferences of the era. In the years prior, the company had released two Manhunt games and The Warriors while leaning hard into the open-world formula it pioneered with 2001’s Grand Theft Auto III – something the industry at large had neither the interest nor the financial muscle to emulate. Back in 2012, Max Payne 3 felt much more like business as usual for Rockstar rather than a full stop.
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