Max Payne News, Tips, Tricks & Ideas

Remedy Entertainment makes games packed full of memorable moments. Whether it’s Max Payne’s nightmare fuel dream state levels or Control’s reality-twisting Ashtray Maze, you’ll no doubt have your favourites. So, we thought we’d ask Sam Lake, Creative Director at Remedy, to choose his fondest moments from each of the games he’s worked on in over 20 years at the studio. Here’s what he picked:

Even if you’ve never played the originalMax Payne, chances are that you’ve seen screenshots of the titular character with his determined, squinting face, looking like he’s ready to take on the world. It’s a rather dramatic look, and you wouldn’t be alone in wondering what on Earth prompted face actor Sam Lake to produce it.

Remedy Entertainment’s Alan Wake 2 is out next week, but it’s been in the works for several years, never mind the time it took for the developer to get the idea green-lit. Compared to its predecessor, this is a survival horror title with more methodical pacing. Remedy is known for its high-octane combat from Max Payne to the more recent Control.

Remedy's Garth Marenghi simulator Alan Wake was followed by two DLC episodes, The Signal and The Writer, which continued on from its climax. At EGX, Remedy's creative director Sam Lake confirmed that the upcoming sequel, Alan Wake 2, will also receive DLC—both paid and free—after its launch.

An indie shooter called El Paso, Elsewhere is making waves on Steam with some gorgeous retro aesthetics and a blend of Max Payne-style action and vampire-fueled supernatural horror.

Remedy, the original developers for Max Payne, entered an agreement with Rockstar Games to help bring its remakes alive. However, it's not as simple as you may think. 

Remedy has revealed that they are bundling the remakes of first two Max Payne games together into one big project.

Remedy Entertainment is prepping for the release of Alan Wake 2, its long-awaited horror follow-up to the 2010 cult classic, with recent gameplay showcasing Wake’s Writing Room and the Oceanview Hotel. However, the developer has several other projects in development, including Control 2  (with Alan Wake 2 setting up its story) and a remake for Max Payne 1 and 2.

Remedy‘s creative director has shed more light on the upcoming remakes of Max Payne and Max Payne 2.

Alan Wake 2 draws ever closer, with its 27th October release now visible on the horizon. As such, we'll likely learn more about the still-mysterious title in the coming days, and courtesy of IGN's First initiative, we've got a surreal gameplay snippet to moon over in the meantime.

Remedy Entertainment is gearing up to release Alan Wake 2 which adopts the survival horror genre and features two protagonists. In the lead-up to the game’s launch, Remedy has been sharing information about Wake’s next adventure. We know that the other protagonist is a detective named Saga Anderson and that we’ll be heading back to Bright Falls for her segment of the story.

With 2019’s Control, Remedy Entertainment established the Remedy Connected Universe, which, like its name suggests, pulls two of Remedy’s owned properties – Alan Wake and Control – into a shared universe.

13 years after the launch of its predecessor, Alan Wake 2 finally continues the story of gaming’s favourite haunted novelist. But the sequel is expanding more than just Alan’s tale. This game is the third entry in the Remedy Connected Universe, an idea that will see the Finnish studio’s works overlap, connect, and influence each other.

In 2021, Strange Scaffold director Xalavier Nelson, Jr. began promoting his next upcoming video game El Paso, Elsewhere with two clear goals: it would bring back the third-person action mechanics that made 2001’s Max Payne a smash hit, and it would ship by the end of 2022.

El Paso, Elsewhere isn’t really a game I’d expect from Strange Scaffold. The developer is largely known for their bizarre titles like An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs and Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator. They’re games that feel like a big middle finger to the mainstream. I wasn’t expecting to see a game from them that pays respect to an old standard.

Rockstar has announced its new version of Game Pass with «an assortment of classic games» being added to GTA Plus. 

GTA Plus now includes a "rotating assortment of classic Rockstar Games titles," starting with the maligned Definitive Edition remasters of the classic Grand Theft Auto 3 trilogy.

Remedy Entertainment’s Alan Wake 2 has received some new gameplay, courtesy of IGN First, with the titular protagonist traversing The Dark Place. As a replica of New York City, it’s where characters tied to his books will appear. While looking for a light to open an entrance into the subway, Wake runs into none other than director Sam Lake.

The latest part of our Alan Wake 2 IGN First is a section of exclusive 4K RTX gameplay played from the perspective of titular writer Alan Wake himself. The above video takes place in The Dark Place – a nightmare New York he’s trapped in - Alan finds a familiar face lurking in one of its many shadowy alleyways. This jacket-wearing, paisley tie-sporting detective is no other than Alex Casey, the hero from Wake’s successful crime book series.

Remedy has long been a studio that wears its influences on its sleeve. From the hard-boiled police files of Max Payne to the New Weird foundations of Control, movies, TV shows, and books have long served as inspiration. This is no different in Alan Wake 2, which blends horror and detective fiction in creatively unsettling ways. We talked to Remedy to find out why these genres work so well together, discuss some of the game’s cultural touchstones, and how they bleed their way into the survival horror story, characters, and gameplay.

Alan Wake 2 is longer than any other game that Remedy has ever made, director Sam Lake confirms, as we rapidly approach the Alan Wake 2 release date. An ambitious sequel to the 2010 original, Alan Wake 2 is a story-driven horror game with a twist, as you control two characters whose narratives intersect at key moments. If you’ve played Control, Quantum Break, Max Payne, Max Payne 2, or the original Wake, Alan Wake 2 is set to keep you entertained for much longer, with a runtime that Lake says is roughly double that of Remedy’s usual games.

Remedy Entertainment is a rather well-known video game development studio. They have delivered some big hits, including Max Payne, Quantum Break, and Control. Now, their focus is bringing out a sequel to one of their past hits from 2010, Alan Wake. Today, we’re learning that Alan Wake 2 will be Remedy Entertainment’s longest video game to date. While their past works were not necessarily lengthy ventures for players to deal with, Remedy Entertainment’s creative director, Sam Lake, has revealed that the studio has continued to strive to bring out longer video game experiences. 

If you’re looking for spooky games in October, you won’t encounter a shortage, as the month is stuffed with more than you could possibly play. Alan Wake 2 is one of the most anticipated upcoming horror titles, and though it’ll be taking us back to Bright Falls, it is evident that there’s plenty of new content awaiting.

There’s only one drug in Starfield and that’s Aurora. This powerful narcotic slows time in combat, turning you into a Max Payne and allowing your explorer to vaporize enemies with uncanny speed. Aurora is one of the best stims in the game, and it can only be found in Neon. Unfortunately, the security on Neon won’t let you leave with these stims. You’ll have to find another way to get drugs outside the city — and that can be done through crafting.

In 2008, Rockstar brought its full line-up of PC games to Steam, and players quickly discovered that several of those titles were distributed with illegal cracks made by pirate groups. 15 years later, that fact is still having unintended consequences for legitimate players of the GTA dev's classics.

If you've ever felt that old Rockstar games perform poorly on PC, you're not alone. Many fans have long complained of performance issues, but it had largely been put down to their age, and the fact that they're having to run on operating systems that didn't exist when they were released. That, however, might not be the reason at all.

Back in early July Holstin grabbed us desperately by the lapels and vomited horrible slime into our faces with this delightful sequence of combat concept that's not quite anything we've seen in survival horror or isometric action before,  a smooth transition from an isometric to over-the-shoulder third person shooting.

This certainly isn't what I expected. The troubled Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines 2, which I'd just about given up on, is now set to release next fall, over four years after its initial intended launch. Paradox Interactive has tapped The Chinese Room, developer of Dear Esther and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, as the studio to bring the fraught RPG across the finish line.

In the never-ending quest for more eyeballs on its stuff, Bethesda Softworks has enlisted the talents of award-winning pop-rock group Imagine Dragons to create a song for Starfield called Children of the Sky. It's not the worst collaboration between a game studio and mainstream musician I've ever heard, but that's at least in part because I'm old enough to have a clear recollection of something called Hope For the Future.

It looks like Michael Unsworth, Rockstar's vice president of writing, may have quietly left the company after a lengthy career that began in 2007. Unsworth's apparent departure came to light through his LinkedIn page, which indicates that he left Rockstar sometime earlier this year.

Michael Unsworth, whose work includes both Red Dead Redemption titles as well as GTA 5, has left Rockstar Games after 16 years (via VGC). A user on the GTA forums named Rucke found that Unsworth had updated his LinkedIn profile to show that he no longer works for Rockstar Games.

Over the weekend, it was discovered that Mike Unsworth, the vice president of writing for Rockstar Games, had left the studio. 

Rockstar Games vice president of writing Mike Unsworth has reportedly left the Grand Theft Auto VI developer after 16 years. Unsworth's LinkedIn profile was updated to indicate the veteran developer had left Rockstar.

Red Dead Redemption series writer Michael Unsworth has signalled his departure from developer Rockstar Games, after 16 years at the company.

Gamescom Opening Night Live remained relatively lowkey this year, with host Geoff Keighley promising mostly updates on announced projects rather than reveals of brand-new ones. As such, it's probably not much of a surprise if you didn't tune in live. To get you up to speed on all the event's PS5, PS4 announcements, please see the list below. You can click on each headline to learn more about each story, including trailers.

Rockstar Games’ vice president of writing, Mike Unsworth, has seemingly left the Grand Theft Auto developer. 

Thirteen years is a long time to spend in a Hell of your own mind’s making, so it’s a blessing in disguise that Alan Wake has a case of the video game amnesia about much of that time. There’s a glimmer of hope for him though, as Alan Wake 2 gives him a fresh chance to find a way out and get back to the real world.

Rockstar is moving full steam ahead on the development of Grand Theft Auto 6, but when the company moves forward into that next era, it will seemingly be doing so without a key figure behind the scenes.

Rockstar Games' vice president of writing, Mike Unsworth, has departed the company.

And neither are the Max Payne remakes.

With its fire-swept valleys, magical swords, old-school twin revolvers, and ghastly monsters, Hellsweeper VR asks in all-capital letters: DARE TO DESCEND TO HELL? I mean, I think I am. Tentatively at least. 

As we get our latest look at Alan Wake 2 during Gamescom 2023, Remedy creative director Sam Lake says the team “could not have made this game earlier.” In an interview attended by PCGamesN at the event, Lake and Alan Wake 2 director Kyle Rowley tell us how the survival horror game plays on the history of Remedy itself.

Remedy Entertainment’s portfolio of titles includes some of the most renowned in the industry, such as Max Payne and Alan Wake. While the developer has created a connected universe with more recent titles, not all the games it’s ever made are part of it.

Action-horror sequel Alan Wake 2 showed up to last night’s Gamescom festivities with a cryptic trailer (below) that showed the studio’s signature Lynchian mystery, an upside-down New York, and some interesting live-action scenes. But references to Remedy’s past games have been the big conversation driver, especially since the studio is building up a “Remedy Connected Universe.” Creative director Sam Lake has now clarified that time-bending shooter Quantum Break and the Max Payne games aren’t cool enough to join the Remedy-verse, while also breaking down their approach to these shared-world games.

You might have wondered why the latest Alan Wake 2 trailer, fresh from Opening Night Live 2023, includes a glimpse at a character who looks like Max Payne.

A new Alan Wake 2 trailer debuted during Gamescom 2023 Opening Night Live, and it's a super spooky smorgasbord of subtle references to the Remedy Connected Universe.

There was a time, not all that long ago, when movies based on videogames were surefire losers. The reasons varied, but the bottom line was the same: It just never worked out. In more recent times, though, that situation has turned around dramatically: The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a major hit, while The Last of Us—an HBO series rather than a film, but close enough—earned universal critical and commercial acclaim.

After weeks of rumors and speculation, we finally have confirmation that Red Dead Redemption, the beloved western game from Rockstar Games, will be getting a much-anticipated re-release this month, giving players a chance to saddle up once again as John Marston and take on the wild west. It will not be the full remake or remaster players had hoped for, but it will still give players a chance to enjoy this beloved title on modern consoles.

It’s hard to articulate my love for Max Payne. One of the greatest games of all time, when I try to explain precisely what makes it so excellent I get so flustered and overexcited all my words just kind of merge into one big sound. Likewise, Max Payne 2, the action-adventure game sequel, remains one of the best games of 2003, especially those levels in the funhouse. With the Alan Wake 2 release date on its way and Remedy also working on the Max Payne remakes, if you haven’t sampled the hard-boiled, bullet-time shooters already – or just want to slow-mo dive back into Max Payne after almost 20 years – you can get both games now for under $5.

In time for the 22nd anniversary of the original Max Payne modder Alexey Savvon has released a mod that brings the original face of Sam Lake back into the action. 

Sam Lake, the writer and director best-known for his work on Alan Wake and Control, has a unique connection to Max Payne. In the original game, Lake's face was used to bring the NYPD police detective to life. Lake even went so far as to dress up for the role in the original game's cutscene.

Did you have trouble getting into Max Payne 3’s melancholic bullet-time extravaganza but couldn’t put your finger on why? I’ll tell you: it’s because the eponymous pouty-pants wasn’t wearing the face of Sam Lake, the original face model for Max Payne. Now’s your chance to finally get immersed in the dour, gritty spectacle with a new mod that transforms Max’s face back to the way the Gods of Visage intended.

Remedy Entertainment, the studio behind several wonderfully odd shooters, have a fun trend where they put writer turned creative director Sam Lake on-screen in many of their projects. He’s playing an FBI agent in the upcoming Alan Wake 2, but the trend started with the studio’s breakout hit Max Payne, where the titular tortured man’s face was modelled after Lake’s. One new mod now brings back his grimacing face in the bullet time threequel Max Payne 3.

Max Payne 3 is a game that weighs heavy on my soul. As a huge fan of Remedy, developer of the first two games, Rockstar's gritty, sad, Man On Fire-inspired take on the character just never felt right. He wasn't my Max, from his grim seriousness to his lumpy, bearded face.

El Paso, Elsewhere the supernatural shoot-'em-up from prolific developers Strange Scaffold, has announced a September release date on both PC and Xbox.

El Paso, Elsewhere has looked great since the moment it first dived, slowly, into view back in 2021. A little over two years later, the Max Payne-styled vampire-slaying slo-mo-shooter continues to look incredibly stylish as it drops its release date alongside an AMV for one of its hip-hop OST’s original tracks.