“Sam sent me one of his train of thought-style poems to illustrate the mood of the game,” says Saaresto. I'd never written any lyrics before, but had a poem with elements I wanted in the song Sam Lake I sent it to Marko and gave him permission to modify it to make it work as lyrics." I had never written lyrics before, but I had this poem that contained elements that I wanted to be in the song. And we started talking about this idea of writing a custom song for the game. He writes the lyrics for all the band’s songs, but he has written other stuff too. “Marko and I go way back, and he’s interested in writing too. “At the time, Poets had just formed,” says Lake. In the end we wrote three songs, one of which would eventually become Late Goodbye.” “Then one night while driving we started talking about the possibility of the band writing a song for his new game, Max Payne 2. “Sam and I have been friends since childhood, so the connection was already in place,” says Saaresto, co-founder, lead vocalist, and primary songwriter in Poets of the Fall. Luckily he was close friends with a songwriter, Marko Saaresto, who had just formed a new band. Now Lake needed someone to write the song. But in the end, it didn’t play such a pivotal role in the storyline-an example of that winding road. In the earliest version of the script the song would awaken Max’s memories of this traumatic incident, and he would realise that it was playing on a car radio while it happened. Lake worked on the script for a month before deciding to take it to Remedy and turn it into Max Payne 2.