High school was a pretty shitty time for me. I don’t want to talk about it. But like any shitty time, there were happier times mixed in there. In particular, there were those times I was playing Mafia. I honestly don’t know how much time I put into it, but it feels like a lot. I mean, I remember jumping between it, Swiss Chalet, and Mario Party with my family one evening. I remember playing it into hot summer evenings while chugging sugary drinks. I played it while learning to drive. Good times, friends. Good times.

Open-world games weren’t all that common in 2002, but they were about to be. Grand Theft Auto III released a few months before Mafia in 2001, and the pretenders were going to be hitting thick and fast. But Mafia isn’t really a pretender. And I don’t just mean because it came out so soon after GTA3 that the developers probably weren’t that influenced. Mafia is a different beast entirely.

CRÈME DE LA CRÈME

Open-world games today typically feature worlds crammed with quests and side activities. It’s almost a law at this point. Mini-maps have bruises from all the abuse they take. Mafia isn’t structured that way. It’s a linear storyline that just happens to be set in an open-world city. It’s more of a setting than a playground. Though there is Free Ride and it was pretty entertaining back in the day.

There’s a lot that separates Mafia from Grand Theft Auto III. Perhaps the most notable is its attempt at historical accuracy and realism. I say “attempt” because it’s not perfect. It’s about as good as you could get in 2002. Abstractions had to be made.

The story opens with Thomas Angelo spilling his guts to a police detective, by which I mean talking about his time in the mafia. It’s not revealed initially what caused Tommy to turn to the cops, but he starts his story in 1930. It’s the Great Depression and the tail end of Prohibition. Tommy tells of the circumstances that caused him to go from an impoverished cabby to a made man in the Salieri Family mafia, and it’s a ride. What starts out as vandalism and cheating at a car race degrades to all-out war between Salieri and another don named Morello.

In 2002, it was an impressive story. Like everything in Mafia, it’s incredibly detailed. Today, it doesn’t quite pass the smell test. The dialogue was ahead of the curve, but in comparison to modern days, it’s stilted and sometimes awkward. I was a huge fan back when this sort of cinematic storytelling was a rarity, but today, I get to the part where the protagonist saves a damsel and gets rewarded with sex, and I can’t help but laugh. It is what it is, and it was what it was. Truly, it’s not terrible, but you can tell that video games were still grappling with telling stories in the medium.

RUNNING MAN

It’s also maybe not much to look at now, but if you’re familiar with the era, it’s easy to be impressed with the technical feats that were accomplished in Mafia. As I mentioned, a lot of attention was given to detail. It’s great to have Grand Theft Auto III here as such a close comparison. GTA3 was impressive in its own right, but Mafia had more breathing room on the PC. While Rockstar had to contend with technical limitations around RAM and the DVD-ROM’s seek speed, Gathering of Developers could take advantage of hard drives and newer graphics cards.

Everything in Mafia has more weight and impact to it. The cars, for example, have realistic handling, traction, and suspension. They even have gas tanks, for some reason. You hardly ever need to stop at a gas station, but you can. It’s not perfect, but you can tell the difference in horsepower, weight, and steering between cars. When you get into a front-wheel drive vehicle, it’s obvious.

More impressively is the way that the cars deform. In GTA 3, if a door on the car gets nicked, it’s replaced with a damaged version of it. It’s very rigid and static. The vehicles in Mafia actually dynamically deform when they’re hit, so it’s more like, er, Destruction Derby 64. The cars are very unyielding, so you can’t wrap them around poles, which may actually be accurate for the way cars were constructed in the 1930s. I’ve admitted before that I’m not that familiar with cars, especially not, like, Ford Model As.

Car chases are somewhat underwhelming because the cars take a long time to accelerate and have low top speeds. This is offset somewhat by the fact that gunshots also leave bullet holes, so you get to see how perforated your ride gets and how close you may have been to disaster. At the same time, destroying a car is just a matter of shooting it until it pops. This isn’t Driv3r in terms of its vehicles; a lot is still abstract, but it’s still easy to appreciate the painstaking detail the developers put into the game.

Similarly, guns all handle realistically with an appropriate amount of recoil. It also doesn’t handwave your supply of ammo. If you reload without fully expending a clip, you waste the remaining bullets in the clip. However, while the shotgun lets you feed new shells into the magazine, Tommy always empties his revolver before reloading. I haven’t been in a gunfight for a while, so maybe dumping the chamber is easier than picking out the spent bullets, but… whatever. It’s still mostly realistic.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say when I got into all this is that there is an amazing attention to detail for its day, and it’s still easy to appreciate all these years later.

FAIR PLAY

The story progresses in a rather interesting way. It starts out simply enough as Tommy gets inducted into the Salieri family. It throws in jobs like stealing a racecar to have it down-tuned, then making you race it in a sequence that was absolutely fucking brutal when the game first released. It was later patched to allow you to tweak the difficulty, but this came out at a time when you actually had to seek out a patch manually on the internet, and that’s if you knew it existed in the first place.

As it goes, things escalate into all-out mob war, so you’ve gone from clubbing thugs to mowing down mafioso in a cathedral. However, it always slows down to give you character moments and to enjoy the city. This can go into absurd territory, as the penultimate mission puts you on a train for a bizarre amount of time.

Every so often, you’re given the option to swing by a Lucas Bertone’s garage, where he’ll teach you how to steal a new car. First, you have to drive there, he’ll ask you a favour, you go do the favour, you return, he’ll tell you how to steal a car and where to get them, you then drive out and steal that car, then you return to the bar to end the mission. It is a lot of pointless driving. This was actually pretty nice in 2002 when games weren’t coming out by the tens of thousands every month, but today, it’s kind of a nuisance. Still, it gives you reason to just soak in the city and enjoy the drive.

The Lucas Bertone missions are hilariously off-tone, though. Tommy will partake in a massacre that he barely survives and leaves him in a precarious situation, and then the game will pop up and be like, “Alternatively, you can swing by Lucas Bertone’s before going home.” Tommy shows up, blood still staining his hands and a thousand-yard stare, and then Lucas asks him for a favour in return for a chance to steal a new car. Just incredible.

And speaking of being hilariously atonal, the police in Lost Heaven are completely useless from both a narrative and gameplay perspective. In the story, Tommy publically kills a lot of people – including cops – and the police barely even look at him sideways. It’s mentioned that Salieri pays them off, I suppose. However, during gameplay, they’ll chase you if you break the law (including traffic laws like speeding or running a red light), which is an interesting level of depth, even if you can get on a tram and quickly lose all heat.

Lastly, the soundtrack is killer. Particularly the title theme, a stirring orchestral number.

THE DEATH OF ART

I’m not a person who believes games age from a design perspective, but they can be superseded by games that take similar mechanics and build on them. We also grow accustomed to certain quality-of-life adjustments, though I think quality-of-life is more of a perspective than a demonstrable concept. If you add too many QOL features, you eventually lose the game part of the game. There has to be a certain point where you allow friction, and Mafia has a lot of that.

Even today, there isn’t really much out there like Mafia. It shows restraint in its use of an open-world environment, using it as a convincing setting rather than a playground. Collecting garbage in every alleyway isn’t a very immersive approach to the genre, so Mafia didn’t even really reach to meet it halfway. Instead, it focused on how to tell its story in the most effective way possible. It immerses you in a world that felt believable (especially in the era it was released) and layering a detailed cinematic narrative (especially for the era it was released).

Mafia is only really worth playing if you are interested in seeing something different, which I hope you are. It can be argued that it has indeed been superseded by later entries in the crime sandbox genre with more detailed worlds and better technology. Even still, it’s rare to find a crime sandbox game that doesn’t fill the mini-map with nagging icons. Even more scarce are games that requires you to just sit and enjoy the drive. You can still see and appreciate the ways that the developers were experimenting and pushing things.

Yeah, part of my appreciation for it is nostalgia. Playing this again, all these years later, I can still feel the summer heat that I stewed in when I played it the first time. But I’ve outgrown the inability to see past that. This time through, I got a lot from analyzing the game using the advantage of foresight and an extra couple of decades under my belt. Mafia has a lot of chew to it. Its successes and failures are all clearly visible under a modern lens. Parts of it are still ambitious by today’s standards, and the fact that it all came together at a time when 3D open-world games were still taking their first, shaky steps is impressive. Truly a game for snobs like myself.

7/10

This review was conducted using a digital Steam version of the game. Mods were installed to increase the draw distance, allow higher resolutions and aspect ratios, and make the UI look better in 4K. It was paid for by the author.