10 Best "The Marketing Was A Lie" Video Game Reveals

Developed by Remedy Entertainment and published by Rockstar Games, Max Payne is ostensibly a hard-boiled detective story about a renegade DEA agent taking revenge on the people responsible for the deaths of his family. And there's a fair bit of The Matrix thrown in too, in the form of bullet-time slow motion, as was the fashion at the time.

The game's marketing leaned heavily on its 'John Woo Presents: The Punisher' story and action sequences. And don't get us wrong, it looked as awesome as it turned out to be, but that was just the surface.

After being dosed with the narcotic Valkyr - a powerful hallucinogen that causes violent, terror-fueled trips - Max succumbs to his own, personal blood-soaked Hell. As he wanders a warped version of his former home, he recalls the deaths of his wife and daughter in the most gruesome and traumatic ways possible. It also causes him to question his reality, as the hallucination breaks the fourth wall, revealing to Max that he is a video game character.

Remedy would go on to iterate on these sorts of sequences in subsequent games Alan Wake and Control, which play out almost entirely like Valkyr hallucinations.