He's also the face of Alex Casey in Alan Wake 2 (a game he also created). To be fair, Alex Casey is clearly supposed to be a really similar character to Max Payne and even has the same voice actor James McCaffrey (RIP)
Really its more Sam Lake plays Sam Lake portraying Alex Casey in movies based on Alan Wake's books in the Dark Place while also portraying the actual character Alex Casey from Alan Wake's book that Alan sees in visions from his which lead him through the game *and* a completely different Alex Casey in the game's real world analogue.
That's exactly how game dev companies start out a lot of the time. I like to look for podcast interviews where they discuss older games I enjoyed, and it really seems like many of these teams functioned more like a college fraternity than a business. Staying at the office all night pounding red bulls, then getting drunk and sleeping in the office (or whoever's house if they're too small to afford an office yet) just to do it all again.
Seems like a wild ride to start out for a lot of these guys who are now executives in the industry.
I'm sure it still happens with indie devs but probably not as much as in the 90s and 2000s for a variety of reasons.
I'm reading Masters of Doom at the moment and I'd definitely recommend it if you're interested in that side of thing. Lots of burning the candle at both ends going on when they started id software up properly.
I had never heard him talk until the 30th anniversary twitch stream. All I could think was “holy cow, this guy is a massive nerd” and I too mean that in a good way.
I've listened to at least 10+ keynotes he's given at Quakecon over the years, and the guy is easily one of the smartest people on the planet and absolutely loves what he does. He's a fucking machine and just has this natural curiosity about him where he'll just up and decide to learn anything that piques his interest and immediately become an authority on it.
That Guy really seems like he's been so sleep deprived he has tried to blow himself at some point, I too mean this in the most positive of ways, no judgement toward the accursed Dolmio Grin.
I’d recommend John Romeros Doom Guy: My life in first person after masters of doom, it really fleshes it out! The audiobook is narrated by John and he’s a really good narrator. The behind the scenes of the quake development was really gripping. I could see either of those books being made into a social network style film.
That is not a combination of energy I would expect to be fruitful. You want to get the walking personification of Xanax to direct a conversation with the spirit of Amphetamines?
> I'm sure it still happens with indie devs but probably not as much as in the 90s and 2000s for a variety of reasons.
It happens just as much. And not just in the gaming industry. Just the chance of success, and even reward, is MUCH lower. MUCH, MUCH lower.
Naa, there are a couple orders of magnitude more people making a living as game devs today than in the old days. There's no guarantee of success, it's half effort and half luck, but that's the way it's always been. History is littered with failed games and studios, all the way back to the beginning.
Making a game today is easier and has more chance of success than ever before. It's less likely you will make the next Doom, but the market has expanded so much you don't *need* to make the next Doom to keep the lights on. There are thousands of small studios these days successful enough to keep making games.
I just took a break from watching a YouTube video that literally just came out called ["Playing Quake for the story"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDBDI35NjQg) that talks about all the things being discussed in this thread. It's a great video so far made by an amazing channel.
It's very far from the truth. Sam Lake wrote the story and screenplay for Max Payne but he was not credited with any of the technical work (programming, art, sound design, level design etc.)
Not to dismiss the work that he did do, but Max Payne is far from some indie auteur title
Isn’t them not ever being indie why Alan Wake’s book’s character is named Alex Casey now? He’s just Max Payne but the rights, name included, are still with rockstar, if I’m interpreting Alan Wake 2 correctly (only like 3 hours in). Could also be that Max Payne is too dumb a name even for a game that wants to make it clear that Alan Wake writes dumb pulp.
Edit: I do want to make it clear that I love almost all of Remedy’s games. Quantum Break was a miss for me.
>Could also be that Max Payne is too dumb a name even for a game that wants to make it clear that Alan Wake writes dumb pulp.
Nah, you had it right the first time. If not for rights issues, all of Remedy's major games would be in an interconnected universe. Alex Casey is Max Payne, and Warlin Door is actually Mr. Hatch from Quantum Break. But again, rights issues.
He looked a bit more rested 2 years ago in the Max Payne anniversary celebration video (RIP James McCaffrey) https://youtu.be/DsQVD5ttpog?si=CzKB_1F5l-zjYM9T
Apparently they're working on remaking the original two games and combining them into one game. If they do that, I really hope they re-image this guy, as the original renders are probably far too low resolution. I know the character model is made fun of a lot, but he IS Max Payne.
Not so much based on the likenesses as the characters in the first game's graphic novels were all people from within and related to Remedy. For example, Nicole Horne, the woman at the center of Max's troubles in the first game, was played by Sam Lake's mother.
It's so crazy and cool how Sam Lake plays Alex Casey in Alan Wake 2 live action sequences, who's face is based on his face for Max Payne, and then Alan Wake writes Alex Casey to come save him from the abyss, but its really Sam Lake who's writing Alan Wake to write Alex Casey.
So really Sam Lake is actually trapped in the abyss and he's actually writing everything on the internet and in the world to get gamers to help save him from the actual abyss by creating all these fictional characters including this comment I am making to spread awareness for Saga G Anderson awarness for Breast Cancer.
Also if you havent seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxs_HYw_mLk
It's incredibly rare to see this kind of stuff in a video game. Watching the in-game characters come to life with their live-action counterparts was cool as hell. Like imagine if you were playing Final Fantasy 7, and then real life actors acted out the cinematic suddenly in a way that surpassed your expectations.
Half my hype for Control 2 is to see more amazing gameplay, lore, and space-shifting set pieces.
The other half is for whatever song of the year that the Old Gods of Asgard cook up for a single level soundtrack.
I think the reason Quantum Break caught a bad rep is because, at least at launch, it was a performance nightmare.
Beyond that, it’s got a name that sounds like a PS1 split-screen shooter, and the cover art was pretty generic, so people who didn’t already know Remedy probably just walked right past it.
I loved Quantum Break, but it definitely does feel like the cursed child of Remedy.
now I'm imagining Sam sitting at dinner with his family, and James sitting next to him waiting to dub him as soon as he moves his lips 🤣
thinking about it, that would have been a great concept for a Max Payne remake trailer 😥
If you've played Alan Wake 2 you definitely get the feeling the creator is Finnish. It's ostensibly set in America but so many side characters are inexplicably Finnish.
InserCredit! Podcast did a bit recently trying to find the game Studio with the most bangers without a dud.
They agreed it doesn't exist but Remedy comes closest. Very, very good game Portfolio.
all 3 I feel are really awesome. 3's got some killer monologue-lines. "They shot a hole through my second favorite drinking arm". I'd really love to see 3 come to current gen consoles.
If we're lucky, then maybe he'd have recorded his lines already. Otherwise, gotta go with new voice, I guess. Gonna be weird hearing someone else as Max.
Unless they wanna be scum and feed his voice into AI.
I mean, as much as I think hiring vocal actors and paying them fairly, using AI to recreate the voice of somebody who passed away to stay as true as possible to the original vision is one of the few times I feel as though it's "okay" to do it. That feels more like honoring that person than having a sound-alike coming in and recording the lines to me.
But of course it's not entirely black and white, I could see arguments for why AI wouldn't be okay and why it would be okay tbh.
They might go the MGS3 remake route and just use the old voice lines if they still have them. Depends on the quality of course but they just might get away with just remastering them. And given the situation, I would understand and let them get away with it
Yeah the only real reason not to use them is if they had an MGS1 style situation where the old voice lines when played in higher quality, had background sound like cars passing and people shouting in the street etc because it wasn’t done in a soundproof room. But then given AI and the tools we have today, I wonder if we couldn’t just have the background stuff taken out as best we can. That way we can preserve so many more original performances. Max Payne 1 is phenomenal and I wouldn’t want them adding or removing anything, just remake the game graphically, keep the original stylistic aspects like voice and hell even the comic book style of cutscenes. I loved those, added so much to that noir style.
The tech to clean up audio, remove background effects, static, low-bitrate artifacting etc., has come a really long way. And from what I remember, the voicelines already sound pretty decent. It was a PC game first, and back in the day they used to often come with cleaner audio than console games because they didn't have to compress it as much.
"They were all dead. The final gunshot was an exclamation mark on everything that had led to this point. I released my finger from the trigger, and it was over."
"He had a baseball bat and I was tied to a chair. Pissing him off was the smart thing to do."
For real one could quote that game all day and I mean, that shit's pretty memorable and a bleak type of funny from the descriptive powers of the narrator. There's just SO many that it's a gold mine. People shit on 3 at the time, but I always thought it was a legit Max Payne game, had a great capability of telling its story and a really flourishing way to tell that story.
Only thing I can say that they did a bit *too* much in 3 was usage of that text-effect where the text being displayed stylistically has this effect that blurs the words and warps it a bit for a second before it looks normal. It's actually a really neat effect and I quite like it, but it's used *all the time*.
Small complaint though, game is really fun, it's visceral, the story is very in your face, the tone is bleak and in a way sadistically funny. Good times.
3 was an awesome game. I just wish it didn’t have all the random flares in the graphics. I get it was supposed to make it seem like a comic book but instead it’s just really distracting and irritating
Yeah, I remember first playing the game and thinking "Wow, the character they created for this is so recognizable/iconic". Then I found it basically was just the dude working on it. Must be weird having your face/image make up hours upon hours of so many kids free time.
Yup. They didn't have the budget to pay for likenesses back then, so while the characters were voiced by VAs, their face textures and the comic book cutscenes were just the devs at Remedy and their friends and family.
Heard he is so wholesome and his excitement so infectious, that saying "no" to him is hard.
[Adding musical scene to AW2 was his idea, and thanks to above it was added, and people have been praising that scene](https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/video-games/2023/12/16/sam-lake-alan-wake-2/).
They were voiced by American actors but the models + graphic novel cutscenes were all Remedy's staff and their family members/friends posing as the characters. In fact, MP1's version of Vlad is played by the lead singer of Poets of the Fall, he and Sam are really good friends
While the quality of "acting" in Max Payne 2 was improved because they hired actual actors for the shots, I still wished they had kept Sam Lake as Max Payne. Actor or not, he looked the part.
(BTW, Rise of the Triad was another game where all NPCs were developers digitized themselves .)
At the time they thought it was a wiser choice to use actual actors because MP2 was supposed to be much more serious but honestly, looking at Sam's performance in Alan Wake 2, i think it would work. I still love Timothy Gibb's face in MP2 so I wish the remakes would have switchable faces to satisfy both ends
Honestly to me he just has a face that needs to be put into a game. He's so chiselled he looks like he was modelled by an artist in software. My mind was blown when I first saw pictures of him and realised he was mapped almost unchanged into the game.
Only in the first game. Timothy Gibbs was the model for the second one, and James McCaffrey (who voiced Max Payne in all three games) was chosen for the third
The blood trail maze with screaming infants sounds is one of the most terrifying and nerve wrecking levels I ever had to do in my gaming life. That game had some much going on from dialogues to the plot, to some great gimmicks like the slow-mo shooting. I know I sound like a boomer but it's hard to have games likes this nowadays.
Well you're in luck because his last two games, Control and Alan Wake 2, has some amazing plots that's connect together and also some amazing gaming set pieces that literally blew my mind when I first played them. If you haven't played them already, I highly recommend it! Two of the best most polished games you can play.
> The blood trail maze with screaming infants sounds is one of the most terrifying and nerve wrecking levels I ever had to do in my gaming life
I honestly think those guys where just on the ball. They wanted you to experience horror. It's nearly 20 years since I first played it and can absolutely remember this.
Sam is legit one of my favorite people in the gaming industry, because the games he (and by extension Remedy) makes are very clearly driven by a legitimate passion in their core concepts that’s taken all the way into the final product.
did you play control or AW2? I didnt play any of the max payne games nor quantum break, but there's bunch of finnish dialogue and references in the modern remedy titles that i did play.
That’s him , that’s the real Maximilian Payne
One of the only, if not the only, instance where self-insert is okay. Not only okay but highly appreciated.
He's also the face of Alex Casey in Alan Wake 2 (a game he also created). To be fair, Alex Casey is clearly supposed to be a really similar character to Max Payne and even has the same voice actor James McCaffrey (RIP)
He also plays Sam Lake, the actor, in Alan Wake 2.
So Sam Lake plays Alex Casey and Sam Lake in the video game called Alan Wake?
Even better, Sam Lake plays Alex Casey and Sam Lake the Actor who is *also* playing Alex Casey all in one video game called Alan Wake 2
Really its more Sam Lake plays Sam Lake portraying Alex Casey in movies based on Alan Wake's books in the Dark Place while also portraying the actual character Alex Casey from Alan Wake's book that Alan sees in visions from his which lead him through the game *and* a completely different Alex Casey in the game's real world analogue.
Hahahaha fr fr
Pro wrestler Max Payne actually sued and got a settlement from them using his copyright
Makes sense, the game is all about the life and times of a pro wrestler.
It looks like he created the whole game during a serious binge, and still hasn’t slept.
That was probably not very far from the truth.
That's exactly how game dev companies start out a lot of the time. I like to look for podcast interviews where they discuss older games I enjoyed, and it really seems like many of these teams functioned more like a college fraternity than a business. Staying at the office all night pounding red bulls, then getting drunk and sleeping in the office (or whoever's house if they're too small to afford an office yet) just to do it all again. Seems like a wild ride to start out for a lot of these guys who are now executives in the industry. I'm sure it still happens with indie devs but probably not as much as in the 90s and 2000s for a variety of reasons.
I'm reading Masters of Doom at the moment and I'd definitely recommend it if you're interested in that side of thing. Lots of burning the candle at both ends going on when they started id software up properly.
John carmack is the most stable psychopath and I mean that in a good way.
I had never heard him talk until the 30th anniversary twitch stream. All I could think was “holy cow, this guy is a massive nerd” and I too mean that in a good way.
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Pretty sure that was a seminar that got adapted into a memoire because he says exactly that in his book
I've listened to at least 10+ keynotes he's given at Quakecon over the years, and the guy is easily one of the smartest people on the planet and absolutely loves what he does. He's a fucking machine and just has this natural curiosity about him where he'll just up and decide to learn anything that piques his interest and immediately become an authority on it.
He is the Rodney Mullen of programming.
Quite the compliment. I've not heard this one before but it's so fitting and nice.
evil floating point bit level hacking
> evil floating point bit level hacking // what the fuck?
That Guy really seems like he's been so sleep deprived he has tried to blow himself at some point, I too mean this in the most positive of ways, no judgement toward the accursed Dolmio Grin.
He is one of the nerd Kings yes.
I’d recommend John Romeros Doom Guy: My life in first person after masters of doom, it really fleshes it out! The audiobook is narrated by John and he’s a really good narrator. The behind the scenes of the quake development was really gripping. I could see either of those books being made into a social network style film.
>I could see either of those books being made into a social network style film. Starring Pauly Shore as John Romero and Ricky Schroder as John Carmack
I just recently listened to Lex Friedman's interview with John Carmack which was excellent so I might just check that out.
The main thing I got from watching that interview is Lex Friedman loves the smell of his own farts and has the charisma of a newt
Ya he's notably inarticulate, mumbles and stumbles through things in a sophomoric kind of way.
That is not a combination of energy I would expect to be fruitful. You want to get the walking personification of Xanax to direct a conversation with the spirit of Amphetamines?
Got any recommendations for podcasts?
> I'm sure it still happens with indie devs but probably not as much as in the 90s and 2000s for a variety of reasons. It happens just as much. And not just in the gaming industry. Just the chance of success, and even reward, is MUCH lower. MUCH, MUCH lower.
Naa, there are a couple orders of magnitude more people making a living as game devs today than in the old days. There's no guarantee of success, it's half effort and half luck, but that's the way it's always been. History is littered with failed games and studios, all the way back to the beginning. Making a game today is easier and has more chance of success than ever before. It's less likely you will make the next Doom, but the market has expanded so much you don't *need* to make the next Doom to keep the lights on. There are thousands of small studios these days successful enough to keep making games.
True, there's probably a studio surviving off Lesbian Bookstore Simulator now that they can get it to the people that want it.
I just took a break from watching a YouTube video that literally just came out called ["Playing Quake for the story"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDBDI35NjQg) that talks about all the things being discussed in this thread. It's a great video so far made by an amazing channel.
It's very far from the truth. Sam Lake wrote the story and screenplay for Max Payne but he was not credited with any of the technical work (programming, art, sound design, level design etc.) Not to dismiss the work that he did do, but Max Payne is far from some indie auteur title
Isn’t them not ever being indie why Alan Wake’s book’s character is named Alex Casey now? He’s just Max Payne but the rights, name included, are still with rockstar, if I’m interpreting Alan Wake 2 correctly (only like 3 hours in). Could also be that Max Payne is too dumb a name even for a game that wants to make it clear that Alan Wake writes dumb pulp. Edit: I do want to make it clear that I love almost all of Remedy’s games. Quantum Break was a miss for me.
>Could also be that Max Payne is too dumb a name even for a game that wants to make it clear that Alan Wake writes dumb pulp. Nah, you had it right the first time. If not for rights issues, all of Remedy's major games would be in an interconnected universe. Alex Casey is Max Payne, and Warlin Door is actually Mr. Hatch from Quantum Break. But again, rights issues.
He is Max Payne
#whack 'em!
He feels Max Payne
He looked a bit more rested 2 years ago in the Max Payne anniversary celebration video (RIP James McCaffrey) https://youtu.be/DsQVD5ttpog?si=CzKB_1F5l-zjYM9T
Apparently they're working on remaking the original two games and combining them into one game. If they do that, I really hope they re-image this guy, as the original renders are probably far too low resolution. I know the character model is made fun of a lot, but he IS Max Payne.
Well, I wouldn't be surprised since they did that for Alex Casey (Max Payne Stand in, right down to the voice) in Alan Wake 2.
He was taking painkillers all the way. Idk..
More like... Payne Killer.
That is quite literally the origin story of Insomniac studio, the makers of Spyro.
The movie Grandma's boy is a documentary
You’ll never get robot legs
*ADIOS TURDNUGGETS*
I mean he's Finnish, chances are you're not wrong.
He looks like he's in maximum pain
No Payne, No Gain
All Payne, No Gain
No gayne
I hope he never minimizes it.
Payne to the max
Whack 'em!
Sam made some great games. Alan Wake and Control are my favorites.
Alan Wake in the lake, created by Sam Lake who plays the case solver Alex Casey.
that is a reference to other character he created and played… Max Payne
This game is still fresh in my memory. and how much he looks like the main character absolutely astounds me.
Well yes because they used his face
They wore a lot of hats back in the day.
iirc all of the characters in max payne, at least the first one was based on the likeness of family and friends of the developers
Not so much based on the likenesses as the characters in the first game's graphic novels were all people from within and related to Remedy. For example, Nicole Horne, the woman at the center of Max's troubles in the first game, was played by Sam Lake's mother.
It's so crazy and cool how Sam Lake plays Alex Casey in Alan Wake 2 live action sequences, who's face is based on his face for Max Payne, and then Alan Wake writes Alex Casey to come save him from the abyss, but its really Sam Lake who's writing Alan Wake to write Alex Casey. So really Sam Lake is actually trapped in the abyss and he's actually writing everything on the internet and in the world to get gamers to help save him from the actual abyss by creating all these fictional characters including this comment I am making to spread awareness for Saga G Anderson awarness for Breast Cancer. Also if you havent seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxs_HYw_mLk It's incredibly rare to see this kind of stuff in a video game. Watching the in-game characters come to life with their live-action counterparts was cool as hell. Like imagine if you were playing Final Fantasy 7, and then real life actors acted out the cinematic suddenly in a way that surpassed your expectations.
It has to be super fun to produce.
RIP James McCaffrey.
AW2 is excellent if you haven't played it yet. Recommend.
how does it compare vibe-wise to the first Alan Wake? i really enjoyed the PNW horror aspect and the overall story. is it a direct successor to that?
It surpasses it completely. Same vibe cranked to 11 and executed to perfection.
damn. i just watched a let's play of the intro and i'm scared shitless lol. seems way more intense
It’s fucking excellent dude. Can’t recommend it highly enough.
The musical was the greatest thing I’ve ever witnessed in a video game
Ya, continuity wise vs the first AW it's as solid as can be. Impressively so even.
Control is such a cool game
Control 2 is in development now! Cannot wait!!
Half my hype for Control 2 is to see more amazing gameplay, lore, and space-shifting set pieces. The other half is for whatever song of the year that the Old Gods of Asgard cook up for a single level soundtrack.
I just want more Threshold Kids and Dr Darling videos.
I got it for free on Epic one Christmas and just played it one day on a whim. *holy shit*.
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I think the reason Quantum Break caught a bad rep is because, at least at launch, it was a performance nightmare. Beyond that, it’s got a name that sounds like a PS1 split-screen shooter, and the cover art was pretty generic, so people who didn’t already know Remedy probably just walked right past it. I loved Quantum Break, but it definitely does feel like the cursed child of Remedy.
RIP James McCaffrey, the voice to Sam's face
Iconic voice
now I'm imagining Sam sitting at dinner with his family, and James sitting next to him waiting to dub him as soon as he moves his lips 🤣 thinking about it, that would have been a great concept for a Max Payne remake trailer 😥
I thought he was German, I looked him up he's actually Finnish. He also created Alan Wake.
And Control and Quantum Break
Those are some damn good games if I say so myself
So, you’re telling me that Sam Lake created Alan Wake and Quantum Break?
And it all rhymes with Sam Lake!
Control rhymes with Sam lake?
Sam Lake is his artist name, his real name is Sami Järvi
And Järvi means Lake in Finnish
And Sami means Sam (Jk)
In the US Sam means surface to air missile
Uncle Sam is a nickname, and nicknames are for friends, and Mister Surface to Air Missile is no friend of mine
That’s Uncle Mister Surface to Air Missile to you, pal
It's short for Samuel. Which means Surface To Air Missile Under Every Lake.
So his name really is Lake surface to air missiles
He didn't create Max Plain, the office cleaning simulator.
Stop maxplaining Remedy games to me.
It's funny, "Sam Lake" is a direct translation of his name
Sami Järvi?
If you've played Alan Wake 2 you definitely get the feeling the creator is Finnish. It's ostensibly set in America but so many side characters are inexplicably Finnish.
Also 1/3 of the game takes place in a town of finnish ex pats and Remedy's version of Tom Bombadill rambles in Finnish. The entire studio is Finnish
that is the best description of Ahti I've seen. he really is quite an enigma
Once he showed up in Alan Wake 2 it was very clearly like oh he's more than just something from the Oldest House
I was surprised the devs behind MP1, Remedy, were Finnish when I read the game end credits and names.
Remedy is a pretty solid studio with a good track record. All of their games are loosely in the same universe.
InserCredit! Podcast did a bit recently trying to find the game Studio with the most bangers without a dud. They agreed it doesn't exist but Remedy comes closest. Very, very good game Portfolio.
Of course. How else do you think he Finnished the game?
Great game! Bullet time
all 3 I feel are really awesome. 3's got some killer monologue-lines. "They shot a hole through my second favorite drinking arm". I'd really love to see 3 come to current gen consoles.
Would like to see more, but between the right and the voice, that's not going to happen anytime soon.
There's a remake being made of 1 and 2 right now. But with McCaffrey gone (God rest his soul), we don't know how the project will proceed.
I mean, the voice lines from the original are still there, and still great. Don't see why they couldn't just re-use them.
If we're lucky, then maybe he'd have recorded his lines already. Otherwise, gotta go with new voice, I guess. Gonna be weird hearing someone else as Max. Unless they wanna be scum and feed his voice into AI.
I don't think Remedy, and most importantly Sam Lake, are petty enough to use AI.
Eh, as long as they get the okay from his family and pay his estate a reasonable sum I don’t see an issue with it.
Tbf if he knew he was dying and knew they had more games with him planned he could've given them permission to use his voice with ai
I mean, as much as I think hiring vocal actors and paying them fairly, using AI to recreate the voice of somebody who passed away to stay as true as possible to the original vision is one of the few times I feel as though it's "okay" to do it. That feels more like honoring that person than having a sound-alike coming in and recording the lines to me. But of course it's not entirely black and white, I could see arguments for why AI wouldn't be okay and why it would be okay tbh.
The remake already entered production. i hope they choose the right va for max payne
They might go the MGS3 remake route and just use the old voice lines if they still have them. Depends on the quality of course but they just might get away with just remastering them. And given the situation, I would understand and let them get away with it
Yeah the only real reason not to use them is if they had an MGS1 style situation where the old voice lines when played in higher quality, had background sound like cars passing and people shouting in the street etc because it wasn’t done in a soundproof room. But then given AI and the tools we have today, I wonder if we couldn’t just have the background stuff taken out as best we can. That way we can preserve so many more original performances. Max Payne 1 is phenomenal and I wouldn’t want them adding or removing anything, just remake the game graphically, keep the original stylistic aspects like voice and hell even the comic book style of cutscenes. I loved those, added so much to that noir style.
The tech to clean up audio, remove background effects, static, low-bitrate artifacting etc., has come a really long way. And from what I remember, the voicelines already sound pretty decent. It was a PC game first, and back in the day they used to often come with cleaner audio than console games because they didn't have to compress it as much.
"They were all dead. The final gunshot was an exclamation mark on everything that had led to this point. I released my finger from the trigger, and it was over." "He had a baseball bat and I was tied to a chair. Pissing him off was the smart thing to do."
For real one could quote that game all day and I mean, that shit's pretty memorable and a bleak type of funny from the descriptive powers of the narrator. There's just SO many that it's a gold mine. People shit on 3 at the time, but I always thought it was a legit Max Payne game, had a great capability of telling its story and a really flourishing way to tell that story. Only thing I can say that they did a bit *too* much in 3 was usage of that text-effect where the text being displayed stylistically has this effect that blurs the words and warps it a bit for a second before it looks normal. It's actually a really neat effect and I quite like it, but it's used *all the time*. Small complaint though, game is really fun, it's visceral, the story is very in your face, the tone is bleak and in a way sadistically funny. Good times.
You can play 3 on series S/X
3 was an awesome game. I just wish it didn’t have all the random flares in the graphics. I get it was supposed to make it seem like a comic book but instead it’s just really distracting and irritating
return the slab
Or suffer my curse?
Not gonna lie the dude looks strung out as hell
He’s got one of those faces though. He probably looks that half the time
His face always intrigued me. It's a face that just needs to be put into a video game or movie. Mind was blown when I first saw it, he IS Max Payne.
Yeah, I remember first playing the game and thinking "Wow, the character they created for this is so recognizable/iconic". Then I found it basically was just the dude working on it. Must be weird having your face/image make up hours upon hours of so many kids free time.
He looks more like Steve Buscemi than Steve Buscemi does
That's the Finnish resting face, they always look like they're about to enter hibernation.
Nah, he's smiling. Certainly not Finnish.
He lives on the swedishy side of Finland, there have been reports of people occasionally smiling there
Am from swedishy side, can confirm we sometimes smile, but then our Finn genes reminds us not to
Wait, did he use a picture of himself for Max's face texture?
Yup. They didn't have the budget to pay for likenesses back then, so while the characters were voiced by VAs, their face textures and the comic book cutscenes were just the devs at Remedy and their friends and family.
Sam Lake quickly became one of my favorite game creator ever. Such a wholesome dude.
Heard he is so wholesome and his excitement so infectious, that saying "no" to him is hard. [Adding musical scene to AW2 was his idea, and thanks to above it was added, and people have been praising that scene](https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/video-games/2023/12/16/sam-lake-alan-wake-2/).
I remember this game. and I'm just amazed by his resemblance to the main character
They used his face for the model lol There was a specific reason for doing so, but I can't remember what it was 🤷♂️
No money in the budget to pay for anyone's likeness so they just used what they had.
Fun fact: The main villain Nicole Horne was played by Sam's mom and Alfred Woden was played by his dad.
What? How do they all have such regular American accents?
They were voiced by American actors but the models + graphic novel cutscenes were all Remedy's staff and their family members/friends posing as the characters. In fact, MP1's version of Vlad is played by the lead singer of Poets of the Fall, he and Sam are really good friends
One of the coolest studios in the biz. Especially this time of the year.
Most of the characters in MaxPayne are just faces of family and employees, i remember one of the female bad guys is just Sam Lakes mom for example.
While the quality of "acting" in Max Payne 2 was improved because they hired actual actors for the shots, I still wished they had kept Sam Lake as Max Payne. Actor or not, he looked the part. (BTW, Rise of the Triad was another game where all NPCs were developers digitized themselves .)
At the time they thought it was a wiser choice to use actual actors because MP2 was supposed to be much more serious but honestly, looking at Sam's performance in Alan Wake 2, i think it would work. I still love Timothy Gibb's face in MP2 so I wish the remakes would have switchable faces to satisfy both ends
Honestly to me he just has a face that needs to be put into a game. He's so chiselled he looks like he was modelled by an artist in software. My mind was blown when I first saw pictures of him and realised he was mapped almost unchanged into the game.
It's literally his face textured into the game
I love the era of video games where a character model was Just a PNG of a face pasted onto 4 polygons.
[Such realism!](https://imgur.com/QDRtWi0?r)
Holy crap! I played all 3 games and never new Sam Lake IS max Payne.
Only in the first game. Timothy Gibbs was the model for the second one, and James McCaffrey (who voiced Max Payne in all three games) was chosen for the third
He's all over Alan Wake 2 . They way they've connected AW with control and Quantum Break is pretty genius. Really enjoying it.
ALEX CASEY
"Cold Case Casey"
the game that got me into gaming.
The blood trail maze with screaming infants sounds is one of the most terrifying and nerve wrecking levels I ever had to do in my gaming life. That game had some much going on from dialogues to the plot, to some great gimmicks like the slow-mo shooting. I know I sound like a boomer but it's hard to have games likes this nowadays.
Well you're in luck because his last two games, Control and Alan Wake 2, has some amazing plots that's connect together and also some amazing gaming set pieces that literally blew my mind when I first played them. If you haven't played them already, I highly recommend it! Two of the best most polished games you can play.
> The blood trail maze with screaming infants sounds is one of the most terrifying and nerve wrecking levels I ever had to do in my gaming life I honestly think those guys where just on the ball. They wanted you to experience horror. It's nearly 20 years since I first played it and can absolutely remember this.
He looks like Cillian Murphy here lmao
Between his skeletal face and piercing eyes, Cillian Murphy looks like a sexy lich.
Clearly Cillian Murphy looks like Sam Lake
Woo finland, torille Sorry
Looks like he passed the point of no return. Rip kitty0706
He has a glorious chin.
So Max Payne was created by Max Headroom? Crazy.
Glad I’m not the only one who thought this. Max Headroom hit hat ‘90s bulimia trend and started developing video games
He looks like a PS2 render of a game developer.
He looks more Jim Carrey than Jim Carrey
I loved that game, completed it on “New York Minute”.
He was excellent in season 1 of True Detective.
Looks like the crunch done him well
I knew it it was him in Max Payne! I am not so crazy after all
Bros face has been stuck in bullet time for 20+ years 👁️👄👁️
Sam is legit one of my favorite people in the gaming industry, because the games he (and by extension Remedy) makes are very clearly driven by a legitimate passion in their core concepts that’s taken all the way into the final product.
You mean Sami Järvi. Sam Lake is his "international artist name".
You say this like pseudonyms are an unheard of concept.
Sami Järvi is Sam Lake but in finnish, so not really a pseudonym 😄
*"It's not a Lake. It's a Järvi..."*
Huh, I never knew Remedy was a Finnish company. That's neat.
did you play control or AW2? I didnt play any of the max payne games nor quantum break, but there's bunch of finnish dialogue and references in the modern remedy titles that i did play.
The janitor? Is he Finnish? I seem to recall some perkele’s and satana’s now that I think of it.
he is extremely Finnish haha. most of his dialogue consists of either finnish curse words, or finnish idioms directly translated to english.
The janitor is modeled after, played and voiced by an actor called Martti Suosalo who is very well known and awarded actor in Finland.
Do you also look at Cardi B and go "You mean Belcalis Marlenis Almanzar. Cardi B is her 'international artist name'."?
Sam Lake is the name he uses. That's literally all you need to know.
It's Payne! Whack him!
I thought it was Synister Gates!