Bullets, Booze, Brazil: HEALTH on Scoring 'Max Payne 3'

HEALTH

The road to Max Payne 3's release earlier this week for Xbox 360 and PS3 (the PC version releases May 29) has been a long one, both for fans of the titular badass and the world-weary character himself. For the uninitiated, Rockstar Games, of Grand Theft Auto fame, first introduced Max Payne in 2001. He's a hard-boiled New York City cop seeking answers for his wife and child's untimely demise at the hands of junkies addicted to a designer drug. Max's Mickey Spillane-esque story leaves him framed for murder and embroiled in a grand conspiracy involving a secret society called the Inner Circle, the game's version of the Illuminati.

A 2003 sequel followed, wherein Max battled Russian mobsters with ties to the Inner Circle who are bent on silencing him. Despite his survival at the end of Max Payne 2, Max is left a broken man. Now a full-blown alcoholic addicted to painkillers, Max, continues a downward spiral that leads him to Brazil, where he works security for a wealthy family in the grimy streets of Sao Paolo, searching for a new life or at least a fitting end to his current one. And as those who have followed his story over the last 11 years can attest, the perpetually bedeviled Max once again ends up with more questions, and dead bodies than he does answers.

A dark and brutal story set in a vibrant, stylish world, Max Payne 3 is far and away one of the most enthralling action games ever made. And like all of Rockstar's titles, the music is integral to the overall experience. But how do you convey the tragic, ber-noir nature of Max Payne while ensuring the player feels like a cinematic action hero painting Sao Paolo's favelas with the brains of a thousand thugs?

Enter HEALTH. Rockstar called on the experimental L.A. band to create a dynamic score for Max Payne 3 that would ebb and flow along with whatever was happening on screen, a method Rockstar successfully incorporated into 2010's critically acclaimed western Red Dead Redemption. SPIN spoke with HEALTH's John Famiglietti on what is was like scoring a Max Payne game 7.5 million copies, countless ersatz bullets, and one Mark Wahlberg movie after the last one.

How did you get involved with Max Payne 3? Rockstar kind of cold-called us. We heard that they wanted to talk to us and then they came to our show in New York.

Were you familiar with Max Payne or Rockstar before? Yeah, totally. I play video games, I know all that stuff!

Do you have any favorites now? I like Dark Souls. It's super-hard. That's why it's so cool.

Max Payne 3 is also quite challenging itself. It is. I'm really stoked on the difficulty. It's really satisfying.

Game development is often quite secretive. Did you see much of the game before starting on any music? Yeah all the music we did was to video captures of someone playing the level or, like, a game tester playing through it really fast. Anything we'd record, we'd play to the video to see if it sounded good.

View original post here:
Bullets, Booze, Brazil: HEALTH on Scoring 'Max Payne 3'