Dan Houser accepts blame for “failure” of Max Payne 3

Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser has taken the blame for the failure of Max Payne 3… despite it remaining among the best the series has to offer.

In an interview with IGN (via Eurogamer), Houser took the blame for what was percieved, at the time, to be a failed third entry in the Max Payne series, which notoriously underperformed in Take-Two Interactive‘s eyes. It was even the root cause of a whopping $110 million loss.

“It was a linear game, so it was a little different from writing an open-world game, a little more structured. I really enjoyed that as an experience. I loved what we did design-wise, the way the game didn’t have loads, the way it felt like a 12-hour movie, some of the visual stuff we did with words on screen. I felt we were creating a really cool digital noir experience, and the consensus at the time was that people hated it.”

Now, to be clear, while it failed to meet sales goals, Max Payne 3 was critically acclaimed and would continue to find people singing its praises to this day.

“So I would say a large amount of that failure was on me as one of the people making the decisions and also as the writer, when people really missed [Sam Lake]’s writing.”

In the end, though, we’ve got a decently solid future as Remedy and Rockstar have joined forces again to remake Max Payne 1 and 2, with full production having started around two years ago.

Gabriel Stanford-Reisinger | Editor-in-Chief

Gabe has been a gamer since he was young, playing games like Pajama Sam, Freddi Fish, Guitar Hero, and whatever looked cool on GameFly. Ever since 2018, he’s been infatuated with the inner workings of the gaming and entertainment industries, covering a wide range of topics from video games to film and TV.