Tag: mobster games

The Mafia Series: A Three-Part Saga

TiberiusLeave a comment

Induction, Made-Man and Destroyer in that order

Here, reader, I bring you a tale of a video game series known only as Mafia. 2K Games released three installments between 2002 and 2016: Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven; Mafia II; and Mafia III. Depending on how you view the series, it’s either another welcome addition into the open-world genre, or yet another GTA clone, especially in era when that was all too common. And like the series, it may or may not be accused of ripping off along with other video games, the Mafia series draws from the inspiration of mobster media from Godfather to Goodfellas, but what sets it apart from GTA is that the satirical take on American society is nonexistent and the controversy that lingers over the GTA series like a noxious cloud is also nonexistent.

The focus in the games is based strictly on the Mafia and all the mobsters within, so while some characters may be inspired by someone like Bob Hope or Lauren Bacall or Tippi Hedren, the most you’ll get are throwaway lines of dialogue or even cinema boards advertising popular films from the era… which I count as a worldbuilding plus as it captures part of the atmosphere in the games, but I’ll explore that aspect later.

Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven (2002)

Set in the city of Lost Heaven, an amalgamation of several major midwestern cities (especially where the Purple Gang and Al Capone were based in), during the interwar period and Prohibition, cab driver Tommy Angelo is coerced into aiding and abetting mobsters Sam and Paulie into helping them escape a rival family. Already mafia material; on the way back to their territory, these members of the Salieri Family compensate him for the damages and buy his silence, which considering how corrupt law enforcement was at the time, may not have been necessary, then again, not everyone was eating bribes like beans on toast at the time.

Being given time to think about becoming a Salieri gangster himself, Tommy initially declines until the rival Morello gangsters wreck his car again, and attempt to break his legs. Now it’s a matter of survival; those f[aah!]kers were gonna eat him alive. Over the course of the rest of the ’30s, Tommy continues his work with the Mafia and learns firsthand how complicated things could get: enemies with connections, friends who want out, strict adherence to the laws of the Mafia, and even betrayal.

Compared to other open-world games, Mafia’s strength comes in its more grounded and serious portrayal as opposed to simply being a video game. It gets to be cinematic at times with Scorsese/Tarantino-esque set pieces and dialogue. The influence is strong enough that it can feel like any one of the movies it draws inspiration from. Lost Heaven’s setting was reflective of the time period. When the government passed the 21st Amendment in repeal of the 18th, they moved onto other profitable avenues of illicit activity. Hollywood had to get those drugs somehow…

Such a waste…

Incidentally, this won’t be the last time drugs make their way into the Mafia series. Lost Heaven seemingly ends on a high note, but just because Tommy’s tale is done doesn’t mean the consequences don’t find him later. Such as the case with real-life mobsters Abe Reles or Albert Anastasia. And where does he face these consequences?

Mafia II (2010):

In this game where the next protagonist, Sicilian immigrant, Vito Scaletta, takes the helm in the fictional Empire Bay, which may or may not be an amalgamation of a certain northeastern megalopolis. In all seriousness, the name immediately makes me think of New York, accents and all, but if I was a bit more well-traveled, I could probably make the case that Baltimore, Boston, and Dover are equally referenced too.

I haven’t seen any Silver or Golden Age films as of late, but one I do remember was 1933’s King Kong and all its primitive claymation ape suits, as well as 1932’s Scarface. Yeah, the 1983 one with Al Pacino is a remake of a classic. Bet you didn’t know that.

From what I remember of those films was the way the respective cities looked: the clothing, the buildings, the cars, the people and their accents, the outside world and its influence on the story–similarly, the case is felt in Mafia II. Vito says that his family moved when he was seven and he was born in 1925, which would mean he moved to the U.S. in 1932 before prohibition was repealed. He also claimed his father was an alcoholic who was probably also a frequent buyer of bootlegged booze until speakeasies were replaced by legitimate bars and taverns. Maybe some of the booze smuggled into the States made into his flask back east. Who knows?

Fast-forward to when Vito is 18, Japan had since roped the U.S. into a two-front war, and Vito’s gonna find himself on the frontlines after a robbery gone wrong. Drafted into the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment (Currahee!), Vito is specially chosen as a native Italian for the U.S. combined effort to invade Europe through Sicily, for which his unit convenes with the Italian resistance. After guest-starring in HBO’s Band of Brothers for about two years, Vito returns to Empire Bay where his best friend, Joe Barbaro, has made a name for himself amongst the cities’ wiseguys.

Joe helps Vito avoid a redeployment, probably to Germany, by forging his papers, and find more work for him to do with the wiseguys, leading to crimes of a federal degree for which Vito was initially sentenced to a decade. However, thanks to even more wiseguys already serving sentences, Vito’s time behind bars is cut short and he’s released just in time to experience the early ’50s; where the mob was still going strong and official corruption was being virulently ignored long after the prohibition days.

Vito continues riding with the Mafia, reaching made man status, and reaching his highest of highs until, like Tommy Angelo, his past catches up to him and relatively quickly as well, leading to the loss of nearly all of his fancy belongings. Unlike Tommy who was forced into the Mafia out of survival, Vito did so to get riches. He worked so hard to stave off the poverty he lived through in those tenement homes and circumstances put him back at square one.

Admittedly more self-fulfilling than Tommy who definitely had his own qualms with Mafia life, Vito takes a bunch of jobs, one of which just so happens to include (spoilers) an attempt on Tommy’s life. Mafia II starts impersonal and gradually becomes more and more about Vito. He’s clearly not the first Italian to leave Italy and join the Mob in the U.S., but all things considered, he tried to solve his lack of money problem while also clearing a standing debt with a loan shark by dashing between odd jobs, but even if he wasn’t in debt, I still see Vito mad dashing to get the dough for himself.

Mafia II is divided into chapters and the first half has a lot of time in between them. The last half of the game though is spread out through a few days, probably the longest stretch between them being at most a week or close to it, obviously for narrative purposes, signifying what’s at stake: his life. Vito’s loose ends are finally tied, but in the end, the wiseguys who helped him in prison only vouched for him, not Joe who was there by coincidence. We the audience are lead to believe that he didn’t make it, but surprisingly, he and Vito eventually make their way to the third game’s setting…

Mafia III (2016):

Now the setting is New Bordeaux, the game’s stand in for New Orleans, Louisiana and well within the civil rights era and counterculture movement of the late 1960s. This time the protagonist is an orphan named Lincoln Clay who by modern standards doesn’t meet the genealogical parameters to be considered black, having a Dominican mom and most likely Italian dad (whom fans theorized was Joe Barbaro himself), but going off face value (no pun intended), society put him into the black community who accepted him with open arms, even praying for his safety when he joined the Army and was sent to fight the Viet Cong.

His adoptive family is still there waiting for him, and he learns that they’re in trouble with a gang of Haitian descent while also being the “lapdogs” of the Italian Mafia in New Bordeaux. The antagonist, Sal Marcano, attempts to make an irrefusable offer which then gets refused and after one last job, Lincoln and his family are left for dead, setting him on a revenge quest. Continuing the theme of a living environment, the developers this time being Hangar 13 did well to capture the feeling of being non-white in the Deep South. Segregation ended federally in 1964, but the practice was still burning out years and even decades afterward, hence the the nearly 160 race riots across the U.S. in 1967, a lot of times in northern cities where segregation also existed but was outclassed by the southern way of separate but equal.

Lincoln Clay and the setting really distinguish Mafia III from the rest of the series with a brutally raw inclusion of racism as a mechanic, and it’s everywhere, from women clutching their personal bags whenever people of color walk by to stores having signs limiting or outright barring non-whites from entry and service.

The story, not including all the DLC, had been terribly undercut by the mountains worth of technical glitches on release, but ignoring the initial release’s problems, I say the game does a great job of putting the player in the shoes of those who called that a reality back in the day. My grandmother, who grew up in Virginia in the ’40s and ’50s, has a bunch of corroborating stories from the era. It reminds me of the approach taking by Max Payne 3, making Max a private bodyguard for the wealthy in South America, isolating him linguistically as he traverses the many locales of São Paulo. You are the one nail that can’t be hammered in very easily.

From Prohibition to early Cold War to civil rights, the Mafia series had a momentous evolution. As of writing this, I’m 2/3s of the way through Mafia II and I’m still at the beginning of Mafia 2002 with plans to complete them both and the third one sometime in the future. In spite of all the faults in the games, I can’t recommend enough that you experience this trilogy at least once if you haven’t already.

Crime Games: An Answer to the Mobster Movie

TiberiusLeave a comment

The trifecta is complete

Before we begin, hope you all had filling Thanksgiving festivities for those who celebrate. I went through a slight hiccup with frozen food, but the other stuff was taken care of, so nothing to worry about. Now to the post.

If you’re looking at the title and thinking, “didn’t you do this two weeks ago?” Technically, yes I did. But that was about true crime, documentaries or media next to documentaries about real life crimes that have happened before, i.e. the Five Families, the Winter Hill gang, Al Capone, Bonnie and Clyde, and countless other criminal figures of yesteryear, all of them inspiring many of our fictional crime lords and kingpins in other media like Gus Fring and Don Eladio in Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul, Clay and Jax Teller in Sons of Anarchy, or for this post, most of the GTA and Mafia games’ lineup of characters. These are long-running series with colorful casts so allow me to preview the short version:

If I were a documentarian, I’d put characters like Tommy Vercetti in the bin of “Amalgamation of Prior Characters Seen in Media.” And not just him; other GTA protagonists and/or GTA moments have taken inspiration from movies released in the past. Some of the games take place in a specific time period and thus take inspiration from movies released around the same time. This video from WatchMojo.com lists different examples:

Channel: WatchMojo.com

Some of these may be easter eggs, but it goes to show how many fans of [Insert Movie Here] work or worked at RockStar. Call it a tradition to sneak some of these in, but they come in full force in GTA V, coupled with call backs to older games, including but not limited to:

  • a car that references James Bond on its license plate, equipped with spy gadgets
  • the cargo train’s registration number on the front referencing the year of the PS2’s highest selling video game (San Andreas)
  • Lester listing off successful heists initiated by prior protagonists; one of those characters being recruitable for a job later in the game
  • Michael’s special ability calling back to the bullet time mechanics of Max Payne
  • and if you wanna get technical, the five-year release gap between GTA’s IV and V, also calling back to CJ’s opening lines in San Andreas

As for real-life inspirations in the GTA series, well, that’s complicated. Vice City provides the easiest example taking inspiration from 1983’s Scarface which is a remake of the 1932 movie of the same name which was about its real-life namesake, Alphonse “Snorky/Scarface” Capone.

From my research, GTA’s influences do call back to high crime eras in American (and sometimes British history), but don’t take direct inspiration from any named criminal or mobster, comfortable to let Hollywood do it for generations before developing a love-letter masquerading as a video game. Sounds like a bit of a letdown, but a series that collects controversy like Yu-Gi-Oh! cards would probably try its hardest to let the games speak for itself, hence why RockStar’s problems weren’t in the headlines until later. Gratuitous cartoon violence was still thought of at the time as limited to Hanna-Barbera cartoons, so facsimiles of someone’s granny legging it after a gun goes off, or rural folk from D[bell noise]k-Fart, NorCal going hog wild thanks to cheat codes would be unheard of in the series’ early days.

I doubt it was much the same for the Mafia series, since that one could sneak past unnoticed, and if it did, the Mafia movie comparisons were proudly warn on its chest like a veteran’s war medals. You didn’t need to convince me that Tommy Angelo was Al Capone or that Mafia II was The Sopranos. It admits that by way of the title, and in stride. The Mafia series also heavily fictionalizes real-life locales, but thankfully offers more than the New York-Miami-Los Angeles trifecta that contemporary media blows its load over. It may just be me, but as a native New Yorker, I could do with a lot less New York. If a thousand monkeys can eventually produce Shakespeare, surely it can take a greater than or equal to number of monkeys to make modern-day Amarillo, Texas more exciting. The Coen brothers achieved that with Fargo back in the day.

So getting away from the usual three, Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven’s titular city is meant to be a fictionalization of Chicago in the 1930s, during and after Prohibition. Mafia II takes place in the mid-1940s and early-50s in Empire Bay, a fictionalized version of several East Coast cities, but having the trademark Mid-Atlantic accents that later defined New York and, depending on who you ask, Baltimore. Mafia III comes right out of left field by throwing the player into the Deep South in the 1960s, stuck between the counterculture movement at home and Vietnam abroad. Specifically, it creates a more in-depth though still fictional version of New Orleans, this time known as New Bordeaux, complete with all the neighborhoods that are said to be in New Orleans, though as I’ve writing, I’d never been. I wouldn’t mind a trip though, I hear Mardi Gras is a hoot.

So while the RockStar series is content with pure fiction, the Mafia series uses history as a jumping ground. Having said that, crime games have proven to be more imaginative than just these examples; I just have a lot of expertise in this field as an avid player of both GTA and Mafia. I believe I said this a few weeks ago, but this isn’t exclusively an American or British thing. Throw a dart on a map, and the country the dart lands on may have something next to a fictional depiction of organized crime–even if it’s beat out by a more popular neighbor. Consider how the western populace learned about organized crime in East Asia or the former Soviet Union, or how crime and law enforcement probably goes back even further than Hammurabi and Babylon.

And obviously not all crime games put you at odds with the law; sometimes it’s you flashing the badge instead of blasting away at the guys who do. Followers already know about my love life with Max Payne, but I’ve definitely watched more crime drama shows and played more games where you are the law. One of the earliest games I played called back to Max Payne: may I present to you Stranglehold:

Full disclosure, I have this game (I don’t remember how I got it, it might’ve been from a bargain bin at Target or Game Stop), but I don’t recall ever finishing it. I’d play it again, but I need to check if it’s backwards compatible with the Xbox One before I try, or failing that, emulation or a YouTube Let’s Play can be found to catch me up to speed.

All I remember is that famed Hong Kong cinema director John Woo was contacted by Midway Games, makers of NFL Blitz and Mortal Kombat, to help produce a Max Payne clone with the likes of Chow Yun-fat reprising his role as Inspector Tequila from the 1992 film Hard Boiled, which I haven’t seen. Not that seeing the movie first would put me in the right head space to play the game since I started with the game, but if it helps me get an idea of who Tequila is supposed to be then it’s a good thing it’s in my long-ass watchlist because I’ve got some time to kill.

Traditionally, video games based on movies have been notoriously terrible, but some select developers have tried their best with the material given, sometimes even expanding on the formula established. I know that RockStar paid homage to the 1979 cult classic film The Warriors with a 2005 video game based on the movie, and I remember having fun with Stranglehold, so not all of them are crapshoots.

A more memorable game featuring Hong Kong-based Triad groups came out a few years later. We all know it as Sleeping Dogs, developed by the now-defunct United Front Games and published by the still-in-business Square Enix.

This one does have the Max Payne style of combat and maneuverability. In fact, it’s not comparable to Max Payne aside from the fact that both the respective protagonists are law enforcement officers deep undercover in an organized crime syndicate, but I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s meant to be a spiritual successor to the True Crime series.

Sleeping Dogs is set in contemporary Hong Kong where the protagonist, former San Francisco police officer Wei Shen is transferred to the Hong Kong Police Force to go deep undercover in the Sun On Yee. This presents an interesting dichotomy for Shen as he’s caught between two loyalties: the Triads and the law. I’d elaborate even further, but this ventures into spoiler territory and from what I recall the latter half of the game doesn’t stay as close to this as it originally set out to. This review has more insight.

Channel: The Escapist

Then there’s L.A. Noire, which I’ve mentioned at length or featured videos and articles that have mentioned it at length before, especially the development side of things.

The gist of all this would have to be that life influences culture, I guess. This all had to come from somewhere and the North Side Gang wasn’t gonna emerge from the dirt like Adam in Genesis. But it’s a generally good way to comment on contemporary society. Other times, people just wanna tell a story and whether a million people find it mediocre or one hundred start a fan club around it, the primary focus of entertainment had been fulfilled.

For crime dramas, that succeeds in spades taking home more gold than the original California 49ers. Part of the downside to the crime drama is that it’s come under scrutiny before for inspiring similar crimes, and not just the true crime genre. Violence in media is heavily scrutinized and when it’s in a video game, it’s a media circus that brings more attention than what was previously projected. I know I’ve harped on this before, but I feel that it bears repeating. Sorry to leave on a sour note, but calling back to a video put out by Alternate History Hub: the news should stop glorifying and perpetuating violence. It’s shown time and time again to do more harm than good.

Last thing, before I properly close off: I wanted to make a post about the fourth chapter of Boruto: Two Blue Vortex, but Thanksgiving preparations kept me from properly preparing the notes. I’ll try to get one out sometime in the next week, ideally before next week’s post.