Taking Some Cues From Hollywood Action Movies

If there were a category for pulp games, “Max Payne” would be a perfect fit.

The furiously paced game features an exaggerated comic book aesthetic, complete with balloon dialogue, oil-drenched alleys and writing that’s straight from a Dashiell Hammett novel, but cheesier, with lines such as “The truth was burning green crack through my brain.”

Inspired by Hong Kong action movies, the game also boasts cinematic camera angles and dramatic lighting techniques that generally are reserved for high-end computer-generated films, not video games that need to be rendered in real time on home PCs.

To make that happen, it took Remedy Entertainment Ltd. four years to develop proprietary graphics technology and put out the game. The average time to develop a game is 18 months.

But judging by the solid sales (“Max Payne” was among the top 10 best-selling PC games the week ended Sept. 1, according to NPD Intelect), gamers aren’t holding any grudges.

Petri Jarvilehto, 29, project lead at Remedy Entertainment in Espoo, Finland, talks about how the game was influenced by movies created halfway around the world.

Q: “Max Payne” is noted for its ultra-realism. How did you accomplish that?

We developed our own technology for the game, MAX-FX. It took four years to make, and it’s certainly one of the cornerstones in making the game look so good. We’ve also developed the methods for creating the artwork. Almost all of the textures used in the game are created from photographs, thus giving it a photo-realistic look.

Q: What kind of visual aesthetic were you aiming for?

We were aiming for a realistic movie look, instead of going for totally realistic and authentic-looking locations and people. We’ve been aiming for movie realism, enhancing the lighting, taking the visuals into a more thought-out direction while preserving the realistic elements, sort of like enhanced realism, I guess.

Q: How much were you influenced by Hollywood special effects in general and the movie “The Matrix” in particular?

We’ve been taking a lot of cues from modern action movies. Originally, we started with the vision of re-creating some of the frantic, fantastic action that can be seen in John Woo’s older Hong Kong action movies. But as we went further into the project, we started taking more influences from Hollywood too. From the start, we had the idea of integrating slow-motion game play into the game as an integral element. As you can imagine, seeing “The Matrix” made quite an impression on the whole team. It felt like “Matrix” summarized a lot of the things that we had been thinking about and trying out. And seeing those things working so well in the movie, we just knew that we can really make them work in a game too. And we did. In addition, we took loads of influences from other movies too, like older film noir classics with Humphrey Bogart and movies like “The Usual Suspects” or “Seven.”

Q: You’ve said that this is the first game that used radiosity lighting techniques, but the technique is well used among the Hollywood computer graphics community. Why did it take so long to get into games?

There’s a huge difference in doing big-budget computer graphics and doing it in real time, rendering 60 frames per second with consumer-level computers. This is evident in almost all of the rendering techniques. The game technology usually manages to catch up with the big screen with a three- to five-year delay.

Q: How did you come up with the story line? Were you aiming for a certain style of dialogue?

We had an in-house writer, Sam Lake, working on the story through the whole project. The story is strongly set to differentiate Max and to give him a real personality.

Q: In making this game, what were your top three objectives?

Our main objective was that once you finish the game, you have the same feeling as when you first saw a great action movie. Think back on how you felt when you saw the end credits of “Die Hard” or “Hard-Boiled.” The second priority was creating good, innovative, balanced and fun game play to back up the story line. And the third priority would be the technical accomplishments of making the game look so good.

Q: Was there any special tweaking of technology you had to do in order to achieve the “bullet time” effect?

Yup, bullet time is an integral part of the technology, and it looks good. Since we have bullet time, we’ve had to focus on a lot of issues that you don’t normally see in games, like the individual bullets or shotgun pellets flying in the environment. In addition to the normal “Does this look good?” question, we also had to constantly ask ourselves, “Does this look good in slow motion?” And that meant that we couldn’t really take the “Nah, no one will have time to see that” shortcuts that are often used in games.

Q: Why did it take four years to make?

It takes a lot of time to develop your own engine. There are good examples of games that have taken three to four years even with existing licensed technology. We had to do it all on our own. On the other hand, the fact that we went into the project relatively inexperienced certainly contributes to the length as well. There were a lot of things that we had to learn and research on the way.

Q: Why is the story so grim? Do you think players respond better to personal tragedy as a story mechanism?

Definitely. We wanted to make the story something that people can relate to and also something that would establish Max Payne as a character. Having the story line evolve around Max’s personal life definitely turns Max into a character whose motivations you can understand, instead of just having “that guy with a shotgun.” We really wanted to give Max strong motivations for his actions.

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Times staff writer Alex Pham covers the video game industry.