The Coolest Game Characters of All Time: Max Payne (Max Payne series)

We are looking for cool here, and to do that we need to ask what actually defines cool. After checking the dictionary and finding the definition to be ‘neither warm nor very cold’, I threw it in the bin and tried to come up with some attributes that I consider to be cool, again I drew a blank. So in desperation I got out all my old games and started listing the characters that I thought were cool. Having my list of names helped me a lot to whittle down to just one, or at least a couple, where some serious battling got me the name for my coolest character. So it came down to whom rather than what defines cool in my eyes.

So who is the coolest of them all...? Max Payne. So where do we start here?As with most things let us start at the beginning, he is a normal guy working as an NYPD detective, with a wife and baby daughter living in a leafy suburb, completely un-cool and that in itself adds to his status. But, after his wife and daughter are killed by drug junkies high on a drug known as Valkyr, Max becomes the ultimate badass one-man-army vigilante, and that makes him cool, in fact that makes very cool. He takes on gangsters with his trusty sawed-off shotgun and the uber-cool ability to dodge bullets in slow motion, in his eternal search for vengeance against the people ultimately responsible for his families’ death.

Max Payne is a true antihero; a man trapped within his past, a tortured broken man constantly reliving his “New York Minute”. His film noir storytelling and unique wordplay add so much to his persona, also added to that is his cynical view of the world and as we know everybody loves a cynic. I could go on and on here about his personal attributes that just exude cool but it all comes down to this. He is THE ULTIMATE VIGILANTE; he can slow down time to dodge bullets, has drug induced flashbacks, takes on the mob, is a tortured soul, has Russian friends, is on the run from the feds, drinks, is straight talking and takes shit from no one, and he wears a leather jacket. Someone please tell me anything there that isn’t cool. Also the game is full of Norse references and everybody loves Vikings, especially ones with Viking long-boats in.

So there you have it, the pinnacle of cool Max Payne

A faux-pas from me was to not include Max Payne 3 on my list games of the year to look out for, in my opinion a crime on my part and it will be in my machine the day it is released. Check out the stills released by Rockstar they look amazing. And before I get any comments Mark Wahlberg never happened.

-Token Gestures