This Doom modder is sending Max Payne to Mars in 'Doom Payne'

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I can't wait to see the metaphors Max tortures out of this one.

Max Payne Doom mod
(Image credit: BulletTimeTails)

If you've ever wished Max Payne would shut up about his metaphorical demons and start confronting some literal ones, a modder by the name of BulletTimeTails is working on the mod for you. "Doom Payne", which they've been tinkering with since at least June, takes everyone's favourite whiskey-soaked cop-slash-beat poet and drops him straight into the original Doom games, along with his guns, angst, and inexplicable ability to transcend the laws of time.

It looks bizarrely appropriate, even at this early stage of development. Watching Max dance his way around pinky demons and imps in molasses-like slow-mo—thanks to a built-in bullet time mod from a modder called Xortts—just feels right, somehow. The only thing that sticks out is that the game's weapons have become decidedly more 'streets of New York' than 'moons of Mars'. Perhaps I'm misremembering, but I don't recall the Doom guy ever dual-wielding MAC-10s.

Even the weird atmospheric blending of Max Payne's music and morose internal monologue (some weapon and item pick-up messages are replaced by Max's trademark noir parlance) with Doom's bloody ultraviolence kind of works for me. It all seems very natural that Max Payne would be here, in space, emptying a double-barreled shotgun into a cacodemon and feeling sad about his dead wife. Why not?

It's not perfect, at least not yet. Bullet time doesn't really count for much when your enemies are wielding hitscan weapons that damage you as soon as they pull the trigger, but BulletTimeTails intends to convert them to projectile weapons before the mod actually releases. You can see in the video above that the basic zombieman's usual hitscan attack has already been changed to a dodgeable projectile attack. Then again, they usually miss in the base game anyway.

It's two great tastes that taste great together, and I'm interested to see where it ends up if the creator manages to reach the finish line. Of course, what we need now is a mod that puts Doom guy into Max Payne. Let me clean up New York while running at 57 miles per hour. Or even better, let me do it while skateboarding.

Joshua Wolens
Joshua Wolens
News Writer

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.