Max Payne, the titular rogue policeman from the Max Payne series of videogames, kills a lot of people in his three action-adventure games. A couple of thousand in fact, as totted up for one eager Redditor.
The posts comes from TK-576, who breaks down near enough every kill perpetrated by Max over the course of the trilogy. Max Payne 2 and Max Payne 3 were done easily enough, but the original Max Payne comes with a caveat. It’s hard to get the first Payne to run on modern hardware, much less capture it to review footage later, so the numbers there had to be done as it was being played.
The rundown is as follows: in Max Payne, 652 people are killed; in Max Payne 2, 373 bodies are dropped, excluding Mona Sax’s 91; and in Max Payne 3, we have 1,216 point-blank murders. That totals up to 2,291 cops, criminals, and other assorted guards and henchmen. The post goes on to discuss the trilogy’s storytelling as a whole, mostly talking about how Max Payne 3 largely ignores Max Payne 2, a narrative decision that may have been fueled by the second’s poor sales.
This is part of an irregular series TK-576 is running that looks into the conspicuous kill counts of famous gaming protagonists. The first was another Max, Max Fisher from Splinter Cell, who took his killing to the max in Splinter Cell: Conviction.
You can watch a video of Max Payne inflicting max pain in Max Payne 3 below:
At this point, a Max Payne 4 is perhaps unlikely, given that Rockstar is still breaking records with Grand Theft Auto 5, and Red Dead Redemption 2’s still chugging along, even if players are having to find ways to amuse themselves. We have lists of the best detective games, and best story games, that should provide some painless, Payne-less alternatives.