To mark Max Payne's 22nd Anniversary, Alexey Savvon released a perfectly nerdy tribute to the classic adventure, creating a Max Payne 3 mod that brings back the original actor, Sam Lake.
A little Max Payne context: If you're new to Remedy's adventures, Sam Lake (now Creative Director at Remedy) was the face of Max Payne in the original 2001 game, as well as its writer. Going through the first game, you can recognise a few familiar faces, with the team using themselves, friends, family and just random people they met as character models. The appearance of Lake as the protagonist, complete with the iconic grimace, has followed him throughout the past two decades. Lately, Remedy surprised long-time fans with Lake making a return as Max Payne-inspired character, Alex Casey, in the upcoming Alan Wake 2 game.
While Lake was the face of the protagonist in the original game, the role was taken over by Timothy Gibbs in the 2003 sequel. The larger budget allowed Remedy to hire professional actors to take over their cast. When Rockstar took over control of the franchise and developed Max Payne 3, they brought their own take to the franchise. Placing the main story in Brazil, Max received a whole new look and shaved his hair in an attempt to regain control.
For the mod, Alexey brought back the original Sam Lake/Max Payne look, both the face and physique but... y'know, as though Sam had decided that he was going to age at any point and not drink the blood of unicorns as he has done for the past twenty years. Given Max's rough lifestyle too, he's also looking a little worse for wear. So, there are some obvious and reasonable changes between the two doubles.
For the project, Alexey replaced 98 in-game models and 66 textures to bring back the Classic likeness. This includes fourteen hairstyles!
That's not all! The amount of detail is incredible, with Alexey writing in more detail about the integration on the downloads page, "The head with Sam Lake's legendary facial expression modeled specially for Max Payne 3. This allowed the head to be fully integrated into the game with the preservation of facial expressions and materials. All the textures of the head have been adapted and every wound that appears on Max's face during the story has been saved. Even drops of sweat flowing down the character's face in real-time are saved too."
If you're interested in returning to São Paulo with Classic-Max, head over to NexusMods.com to get them!
And if you want more of Alexey's Classic-Max, there's a brilliant set of remastered promotional images from the original title, on their ArtStation, HERE! We're in love!
