Of Gaming and Max Payne

A Love Affair made in Valhalla

My Sweet Sara,

I do not know what drew me to that it. Perhaps it was the gritty atmosphere, the dark brooding characters and the wanton need to blow something up. Perhaps it was the bullet-time, slowing time down into a thick soup that allowed me to drown enemies in bullets. Maybe it was the story, that of a man who had everything taken from him, and now he had nothing to lose. Maybe it was the dialogue: clipped, witty, sarcastic, the symptoms of a broken mind trying to make sense of it all. Maybe it was the man. A man in pain. Max Payne.

I didn’t like the way the show started. But they had given me the best seat in the house. Front row center. – Max Payne

Max Payne didn’t hold your hand as you stepped into its world. It opens with the murder of his family, and you, the player have the best seat in the house. The story starts with a guttural kick to the nuts. Everything lost. Nothing to lose. It’s a subliminal message, go all out. Stop at nothing. To say that the meaning was not lost on me as I played it would be an overstatement.

I still remember rushing out of night studies in high school ( Yay, Boarding Schools!! ), heading to the library, firing up that old computer and hopping into the game. The machine would bleed hot air as it tried to crunch out those amazing graphics. I had a simple rule. One Chapter. That was it. One Chapter before I went to bed. I was a lucky rascal, you see. I was pretty chummy with the Library Captain and so he let me get away with it most of the time. Did I mention I was also the sole controller of the computer’s Administrator account making me the Overlord ? ( That’s a story for another day )

He was trying to buy more sand for his hour glass. I wasn’t selling any.  -Max Payne

I believe game reviewers have reviewed that game way better than I can in this digital missive. ( Raycevick did it best).I won’t speak deeply about the game. But of what it meant to me. High school was a point of turmoil for me. I was an angry teenager. A curious angry teenager. A questioning, curious, angry teenager. I waged wars in my head with everything that was wrong in the world. I questioned everything from the fundamentals of the universe to the existence of God. I was angry at Him. That He would allow circumstances such as those that I found myself in to exist. That He would allow so much wrong in the world. I needed to understand. I needed answers to the why. Looking back now, I was a lucky kid, I just didn’t know it yet.

And here comes a story of a man whose whole world is shattered into bits. A man haunted by his past decisions. A man slowly fraying at the edges yet choosing to do good, to find a little light at the end of his dark tunnel. Hell, there’s an entire stage dedicated to that metaphor. It even comes with bloody trails and a screaming baby. The game spoke to me. It resonated with my angst and gave me a stage to act out my vengeance upon the world. It gave me the stage for the dance macabre, gun in hand and sense to the wind. It gave me that sweet feeling that only a slow-motion takedown round a bend of stairs with one shotgun shot can give. It was bloody, It was chaos, It was mayhem, It was beautiful and I loved it.

I was already so far past the point-of-no-return I couldn’t remember what it had looked like when I had passed it. -Max Payne

It has been quite a number of years since I last replayed Max Payne. The memories of those glorious moments live with me still. It was a brilliant game. Still is. And now as I sit in the dark and the baby in the apartment next door screams her tiny lungs out, I can’t help but think of a man whose only wish was to hear that one sound. Of his child still alive. And I smile, As Max would have smiled. And I am grateful.

Funny how a game I played in anger to erase my past then, makes me smile about my present today. I hope you get to play it one day Sara if you already haven’t. I’m pretty confident it will stoke the fire in your soul and plant a smile on that pretty face.

They were all dead. The final gunshot was an exclamation mark to everything that had led to this point. I released my finger from the trigger.  And then it was all over. The storm seemed to lose its frenzy. The ragged clouds gave way to the stars above.  A bit closer to Heaven. -Max Payne

Yours, Always,

Lawrence

#Gaming #Love #Nostalgia