Also, Remedy has a publishing partnership with Epic Games.
Remedy Entertainment and Max Payne are reuniting with a recreation of the hard-boiled series’ first two action games.
In a joint press statement, Remedy, the franchise’s founders, and Rockstar Games, the franchise’s current rightsholder after the license was sold in the early 2000s, announced the announcement on Wednesday. Rockstar will fund a remake of Max Payne and Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne as a unified gameplay bundle.
Control, Ars Technica’s 2019 Game of the Year, will employ Remedy’s Northlight game engine to recreate both titles. The resultant two-game bundle will be unique to Xbox One X/S and PlayStation 5. Also a current-gen exclusive, Control Ultimate Edition featured ray-tracing. The statement states that “the project is now in the idea development stage.”
This news follows Remedy’s current publishing arrangement with Epic Games. Epic and Remedy have agreed to collaborate on two multiplatform games “same franchise: “One will be a triple-A game, the other will be less. It’s unclear whether either Epic-related game will be released in March 2020 or is based on an existing Remedy IP like Alan Wake.
Remedy hasn’t revealed a PC shop for its Max Payne remasters. Based on Rockstar’s recent history, the game will likely be an option, if not an exclusive, on the Rockstar Games Launcher. (We hope Remedy steers this effort away from another recent Rockstar remaster disaster.)
Remedy last publicly discussed Max Payne in 2018 ahead of Control’s 2019 release. Max Payne 2 was the final game Rockstar intended Remedy to make after relocating the series’ license in the early 2000s. Nearly a decade later, Rockstar produced Max Payne 3 as an in-house project with a distinct scope (though it did keep Payne’s original voice actor this time).
This followed Rockstar’s failed 2008 Hollywood franchise effort with Max Payne. The Mark Wahlberg vehicle has one of the lowest Rotten Tomatoes scores ever.
Remedy has yet to explain whether either game’s gameplay or dialogue would be updated to meet current standards. Other third-person action games have surpassed those standards in the decades since the original Max Payne titles, with hard-boiled speech and a still-novel “bullet time” concept taken from films like The Matrix.
