15 years ago, a team from Remedy travelled to New York in search of inspiration and reference photos for Max Payne.When they returned to Finland they wrote about their adventures and posted it online. It's a fantastic article and a must read for every Max Payne fan:
Max Payne is set in New York City. It was the perfect, logical setting for a film noir crime-thriller. The only problem was: what do we Finns really know about New York? Sure, we had watched all the right movies over and over and over, we had dug the deepest depths of the web for any and all pictures and tidbits of information, we had collected a whole library of NYC books, but we were still missing that first hand experience, and most of all we were missing a whole lot of good photo material. We wanted every level in the game to spell New York in big, bold neon letters. We had all the levels planned out, from the deepest crime-ridden slums to the glittering skyscraper heights, we knew exactly what we needed. There was only one way to get it. We had to go and do it ourselves. Six brave level designer soldiers, about to boldly go where no level designer had gone before.
Read the full article over at 3D Realms!