Remedy Interview - Part 1: "Life After Success"
YouGamers: Did you decide then, once you’d done Death Rally and you were looking to make your next game that the next one was definitely going to be a “full” 3D game? 
Max Payne
Mäki: I think at that point we looked at what was happening in the marketplace and 3D effects were huge or becoming that way. Max Payne really started in early 1997 and the [3dfx] Voodoo card was introduced in ’96, so we were fairly lucky in our early decision to go “all out” 3D – Max Payne was one of the first big games that was announced to be 3D accelerated only… Järvilehto: It wasn’t really that big a game back then [everyone starts laughing] but still, it was kind of funny at the time when we went "Okay – to play this game, you will have to have a 3D accelerator" and everyone went "Nooo!!! You’re not supporting software rendering?!"
Mäki: I don’t think we want to go that far back in our history [laughs] but yeah, I think we supported Glide at some point. Järvilehto: I think some of the very early builds were running on Glide only.
Mäki: Well, Death Rally was a success in that it made royalties (which was pretty rare back then) and it also sold over 100,000 copies which, at the time, was also quite a lot but we didn’t ever seriously consider Death Rally 2. Max Payne, as a project, pretty quickly became clear that it was going to take all of the resources we had…and then some! Death Rally 2 would be nice to see some day, in some form, but we quickly moved on… Järvilehto: We had multiple game ideas but in late ’96, we decided to focus solely on Max Payne (although it wasn’t called that at that time)…
Järvilehto: The game began with a project name of "Dark Justice"… Mäki: …but even that name is indicative of what the game is about but it developed in time to what we all know now. Järvilehto: It became Max Payne only once we had developed the lead character to a point where we could name him, understand who he was…
Järvilehto: We wanted to differentiate the game – that was the reason! [laughs] Just the fact that there weren’t any 3rd person shooters on the PC and for something like Max, it was imperative that we established the lead character and in this mode, he’s constantly in the main screen.
Mäki: If you look at the history of released Max Payne shots, you can see an evolution going on, constantly throughout the development. We’d go back and do Max again…and again…and again [laughs] until he was good enough.
Max Payne 2
Järvilehto: [laughs] Yeah, we have a pool table! [Just a slight understatement! – Ed] I think the biggest thing that the commercial side brings in is security. We’re in a very stable position where we are able to set the rules on how we want to develop games, so we don’t have to scramble for the next thing. There are a lot of developers in pretty dire straits trying to secure their next deal but we’re in a position where we can keep a title in pre-production in for, say, 1 or 1.5 years if we wanted to do and this is incredibly important. Mäki: That’s paramount to the quality of the end result and it will also show in Alan Wake - definitely. Järvilehto: Just the fact that Max Payne has been so successful is very important in validating the thought that: "Hey! We can entertain people" - which is what we get our kicks from. We want to entertain a vast amount of people if possible and seeing people also get massive kicks from the stuff we do is the best motivator you can imagine. Mäki: Yeah and I think it has only increased our appetite for Alan Wake and what we want to achieve with it... Järvilehto: Oh yes! [nods slowly - everyone else starts laughing] Mäki: But that also means we set the bar quite high for ourselves as well.
Related StuffTags |
 
 
See if your PC can handle the latest games:
 
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
Articles: 
