20 years on, Max Payne is still an action masterpiece

It’s Max Payne’s 20th anniversary today, so we’re re-running this article from last year about why it’s such an enduring classic.

As an apocalyptic blizzard blankets New York City in snow, a hard-boiled cop named Max Payne—a man with nothing to lose and an endless supply of metaphors—embarks on a bloody quest for vengeance.

Max returns home one day to find his wife and newborn daughter dead, killed by junkies hopped up on a new designer drug called Valkyr. Three years later he’s with the DEA, working deep undercover inside the Punchinello crime family, the biggest Valkyr trafficker in the city. Then shit hits the fan.

Payne is framed for the murder of a fellow DEA agent, and soon finds himself on the run from the NYPD, the mob, and a sinister secret society known as the Inner Circle. It’s a good thing he’s handy with a gun.