Sam Lake wants you to know that he loves when stories get super meta – what you could describe as getting really self-aware and irreverent of their own world. The Max Payne franchise was infamous for this, throwing its titular hero into a hallucination sequence, with Payne commenting that it feels like he’s in a video game. With Remedy and Lake’s next game, Control, out on August 28, the writer says that he’s had many a flashback to writing Max Payne.
“It’s fascinating, especially when you are studying
,” Lake told IGN on this month’s episode of IGN Unfiltered. “It almost feels like it’s a literary genre made for analyzing it, almost like you’re playing a game. Like you are coming up with interpretations and investing into it and gaining more out of it by investing into it. So playing the game almost with the writer has also been in my mind when writing for games in some ways. That’s where it started. It’s all post-modern and playing around with point-of-view and what’s real and what’s not real …I’ve had many kinds of flashbacks to working on Max Payne.”
Source: IGN.com Sam Lake: Writing Control Has Given Me Max Payne Flashbacks