In Part II: A Cold Day in Hell - Chapter Five: Angel of Death, Max can interact with a piano to play part of his theme, but shooting the lid prop renders the piano unplayable.

Due to lacking the sufficient budget needed to hire actors, the staff, interns and associates of Remedy Entertainment ended up lending themselves to the likenesses of many of the game's characters. Most notably creative director Sam Lake provided the face model for Max Payne, and many of his relatives ended up being part of the game's cast, including his parents who posed in multiple shots as Nicole Horne and Alfred Woden.

In the tutorial level, there's a 'Tar Cafe sign' that has a quote below it's name says "All your base are...". This is likely a reference to Zero Wing's English translation meme "All your base are belong to us".

In Part I: The American Dream - Chapter Two: Live From The Crime Scene, if the player throws a grenade into the big gap on the wall at the beginning of the level, the objectives will then say "I had declared a war against rats". The rats ahead will use their deagles to kill the player.

In Part I: The American Dream - Chapter Three: Playing It Bogart, if the player goes past Rico Muerte's room and goes down the hall where the boarded up doorway is, destroy it and follow where the blood trail leads. There's a dead body with a stake in his back, and a word on the floorboard that said "BUFF" written by him with his own blood. This is a reference to the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

In Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, during Part III: Chapter Three: A Mob War, you can find a hidden dialogue between two Punchinello mobsters while they stand guard by a staircase waiting for intruders:


This exchange is a reference to an old meme from the 3D Realms forums. The exact origins of this meme are not entirely known, but in a developer Q&A that occurred at an unknown date (either for the first Max Payne game, or in the lead-up to Max Payne 2's announcement at E3 2002 going off of what could be easily found in 3D Realms' forum archives), one fan asked them "What about moving?", a seemingly vague and unnecessary question. This question perplexed the game's fan community and developers, who promised that moving would appear in the final game, and it did. The question then became an early popular meme on the forums, later being referenced in Max Payne 2. In a thread on October 8th, six days prior to the game's release, in anticipation for another developer Q&A, the line as it appears in the game appeared to be referenced in a post presumably by a Remedy Entertainment staff member or moderator, who quoted the first two lines in the dialogue.