Great moments in PC gaming: Max Payne's face




It is the face of a man so cross his eyebrows have gone to war over the middle of his face. It is the face of a man engaged in a deep internal conflict with a bad curry that won't quit. It makes me unreasonably happy whenever I see it, and I have played a lot of Max Payne.

I'm convinced it would have been a lesser game if the studio had used a more conventional look. It's part of Max Payne's oddball personality. It also reflects the make-do-and-mend nature of the first game's development. Faced with limited resources, the devs at Remedy just put themselves in the game to save money.

Max Payne 2 dropped the Sam Lake grimace for a new head based on the actor Timothy Gibbs. Lake still continues to appear in the surreal video skits you can find on televisions in Max Payne 2 and Alan Wake. It's not quite the same.

It's a stretch to say that Max Payne was ahead of its time for giving its hero a real human face—among others, Bowie gave his likeness to Nomad Soul a few years before—but I think it's a rare example of a game character being memorable purely because of their demeanour. Max eventually evolved into a generic thug over time, but I'll always remember him as this goofy hardboiled hero, narrating his own revenge tale in overwrought Raymond Chandler-eque monologues.