Max Payne Cheats Only 1

2004, 23 min, color, sound

In Max Payne Cheats Only, JODI presents a series of video game "cheats": alterations to the behavior of a video game that are often built in by the original programmers to help players who have reached an impasse. Here the artists have compiled cheats from the ultra-violent New York vigilante game Max Payne.

Write the artists: "We wanted to do something that was non-aesthetically ours. No scary black blobs on jumping white backgrounds, but trying to achieve the impossible - an abstraction within the aesthetic of a game which is already set."

"Jodi have intervened in the programme structure in such a way that absurd perspectives and effects alter the game's otherwise realistic graphics: we see the massive hero repeating idiotic movements; he dips his angular head into a virtual matrix; his body appears semitransparent. The re-processing can be read as a free interpretation of the bullet-time effect that distinguishes Max Payne from other games, by which the slow motion enables a new perception of space and time." - Transmediale Festival 2006