User blog:Mattia Garavini/Pure Evil proposal: Nicole Horne

For this PE proposal, i'll write about a CEO so nasty she makes Montgomery Burns look like Scrooge McDuck. Max Payne's big bad, Nicole Horne.

What's the work?
Max Payne is a classic 2001 Third-Person Shooter from Remedy Entertainment, which was an attempt to break video games into an untapped genre, Film Noir. A mixture of both the film and graphic novel treatments of noir, it featured such stalwart elements of the genre as the hard-boiled hero who spends time monologuing and shooting crooks, the capable and mysterious Femme Fatale, and the complex plot with myriad linear and tangential echelons of villains, all played under a deep-voiced narration laden with gothic imagery and twisted arthouse metaphors. There are even a number of references to Norse Mythology. The cutscenes were told in Graphic Novel form, made by photographing the scenes and altering them digitally to resemble watercolor drawings.

NYPD detective Max Payne's wife and baby daughter are killed in their home by junkies strung out on the designer drug Valkyr. Three years later, Max has transferred to the DEA and gone undercover with the Punchinello crime family, intending to bring the Valkyr drug ring down once and for all. Then one night, as New York goes under the worst snowstorm in decades, Max's partner is murdered, Max is framed for it, and his cover is blown. With the police hot on his trail, Max wages a personal one-man war on the mafia and a shady corporation, shooting everyone and everything in his way as he gradually unearths the truth behind the creation of Valkyr and the death of his family.

Who is she and what she has done?
Nicole Horne, the main antagonist from the first game is the CEO of Aesir Corporation. As a member of the Inner Circle, she was responsible for Project Valhalla, a program that was developing a highly addictive psychotropic drug when it turned out to be a madness-inducing poison. In response to this discovery, she decided to market it through the mob as Valkyr to the public, thereby becoming an untouchable corporate crime lord who directly and indirectly killed thousands. When Michelle Payne, Max's wife, inadvertently received information that would expose the Valkyr Conspiracy, Nicole had a trio of drugged-up maniacs slaughter both Michelle and her baby daughter. Over the following years, Horne went on to control the entire criminal underworld of New York through her pawn, Angelo Punchinello, and made a play into politics by putting a hit on the Mayor; she also blackmailed Inner Circle member Alfred Woden, preventing him from stopping her machinations himself. When she first personally encounters Max, she has Angelo murdered for outliving his usefulness, then tries to kill Max by giving him an overdose of Valkyr and leaving him to burn alive in Angelo's mansion. She eventually resorts to mass murder to cover up her crime, initiating "Operation Dead Eyes" to murder all her personnel involved in Valkyr's creation, and sends men to wipe out the Inner Circle.

Mitigating factors
Nope.avi

Heinous standards
Through all of this Horne has no clear motivations beyond getting more money, no enlightened intent, no emotion; she is just pure evil, even claiming that the deaths of Max wife and daughter were "necessary".

Final verdict
Another easy keep.