The real story to tell would be what tooling was used to pre-bake the lighing in the textures, e.g. if they used a seperate rendering package or mostly painted by hand, or in what mix.

Also what guidelines they used to make sure the baked-in reflections would match the use and environmental lighing of objects in the scene, e.g. just general constraints or how much customization there was for important unique arrangements. Is it done by the same person in a tight loop or did it involve hand-ofs, etc.

The excellence of the result is down to a lot of tasteful choices in how to blend these techniques, achieved either from experience or iteration.

As programmers we tend to focus a lot on the raw rendering techniques, but there's a whole systematic practice around art direction and how to achieve and maintain quality in it that feels I guess softer and less deterministic but is still worth talking at length about.

This especially struck me when the reviewer here recommended using multiple stacked texture planes and parallax mapping to improve things. I know a handful of games that have done this, and unless used exceedingly sparingly (e.g. mesh fence over pipes or something, where the foreground isn't expected to have a lot of depth) in my experience it very quickly gives away the illusion and looks very hokey. Humans are good at telling it's planes sliding over each other and doesn't correspond to their experience with depth perception. It also makes a scene a lot busier as the camera is moved, firing "something is changing here!" perceptual sinals all over the screen (note how all the lavish particle effects are about feedback instead), and is not the atmosphere Max Payne was trying to achieve.

In other words, sometimes it's about knowing what possible thing not to do, too. And a lot of magic happens when disciplines meet.

Without that level Max Payne wouldn't have been anywhere near as memorable for me.