Max Payne

Remedy built Max Payne as a playable Hong Kong action film and named John Woo as the model, Hard Boiled above all: a lone cop fighting through gangsters in slow-motion gunfights, diving sideways with a gun in each hand, in a story of grief and revenge.

While Remedy Entertainment designed Max Payne’s slow-motion gunplay independently starting in 1997—inspired primarily by John Woo—the mechanic’s iconic name, "Bullet Time," was coined to capitalize on The Matrix's release two years earlier. The player manually slows down time to dodge and aim while fully-modeled bullets trace visible paths through the air, and Remedy successfully marketed the game by leaning heavily into the massive Matrix cultural hype.