Max Payne 3 Has a Release Date September 8, 2011

The second writing gig I had for GameSpy was for The Deep Six, GameSpy’s former Max Payne site.  I joined up just after the announcement of the second Max Payne game, and posted editorials, fanfiction and news before the game came out.  It was a great time.  I got to work with some amazing people, expand my creative muscles, and I got to go to E3 in 2003 and 2004.

Max Payne and Max Payne 2 are beloved classic games from the early 2000s that hold up even today as staples of story-based action gaming.  Its original developer has since gone on to do Alan Wake, but Rockstar now owned the Max Payne property, and they were planning on releasing a new game themselves when they felt the time would be right.

Last year, Max Payne 3 was unveiled, but had you not known in advance what you were seeing, you never would have known it based upon the screenshots and synopsis that was released.  The game was taking place in Brazil, even though New York City was the setting of both previous games, and served almost as its own character in the game.  Max Payne looked and sounded like nothing we had previously seen.  He was now a fat, balding man, and no longer the fit adult with a constipated grimace.  After the initial announcement it was clear, the internet was universally disappointed.

Pretty soon after showing the initial previews of the game, the internet immediately backlashed against it.  I cannot even think about one positive comment I read about this game, or at the very least a hopeful one.  The game that previously had a set release date went dark.  Over the last few months a screenshot or two has been released of Max Payne as we had remembered him, and I started to get hopeful Rockstar had taken the internet backlash to heart and forced their developers to make an actual Max Payne game instead of whatever game it was they were making that had the Max Payne license attached to it.

Well today it was announced that Max Payne 3 is back, and the fat, bald Max is back front and center.  Along with this has come the game’s release date.  The important thing to note with the announcement is that Max Payne 3 will be the first Max Payne game to feature multiplayer (yes, you read that right).

Max Payne 3 is coming March 2012.  Should still be releasing multiplatform.