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You know, when it comes to the recently released Mafia: Definitive Edition, there’s a reason that
the difficulty above Hard—Mafia’s Nightmare Mode, if you will—is labelled “Classic”. In
the odd realm between notoriety and obscurity that the franchise has always found itself awkwardly
mired within, the 2002 original has always stood out as the awkward one of the bunch. Where 2 and
3 released after the point at which open world third person action games had seen some form of
standardisation in the way they were designed and controlled, the philosophy behind the the
original saw the developers making respectable strides towards verisimillitude for its time,
that nonetheless left the resulting product feeling all the more weird and inscrutable.
Getting caught skipping a red light meant you’d be pulled over and given a ticket by the cops.
Reloading mid-clip would see you sacrificing the rest of the ammo in that magazine. Countless
missions would see players spend upwards of twenty minutes driving across the city repeatedly trying
to control these appropriately rickety 1930s vehicles swerving around the road, taking part
in the slowest car chases ever—hammering on the up arrow key in a desperate bid to maintain that
precious fifteen miles-per-hour as your car growled up the slightest of inclines. Hell,
there’s barely any music or sounds outside of the your tinny engine to accompany you on these long
rides—the original Mafia was a stark experience. It was impressive, sure, for a game to go to
such lengths to capture the minutiae of what it would actually be like to live as a gangster in
this time period—to be ground down by the brutally prosaic nature of it all—and it was precisely this
approach, polished up in the eight years between releases, that saw its sequel become one of my
favourite game narratives ever. These games, at their best possess an utterly inimitable,
surgically crafted ambience draped like a tarpaulin over their respective environments;
highlighted through mechanics that had the series playing less like typical
exercises in player-driven madness and more as understated, deeply interactive character studies.
It’s my firm belief that it’s hard to find crime storytelling in games that reaches
the heights that Mafia 2 frequently achieved. That said, sans the relative polish of its sequel,
playing the original Mafia required a focus, a commitment from the player
to meet the game on its own strict terms in order to experience the clumsily
delivered but certainly ambitious narrative driving the game along. And looking back,
that minutiae was often more of a hurdle to your immersion and the progress of the plot
than it was some kind of atmospheric aid. I remember my frustration trying to get to
grips with that initial taxi mission years back was akin to the tutorial of the original Driver.
It was tough to see the beauty lying just beyond Mafia’s spiky exterior.
But then you get to Definitive Edition where, on normal difficulty at least,
suddenly all that fumbling with losing your attackers in the game’s intro is handled through
a cinematic. Red lights don’t matter anymore. There’s a cover system so you’re not tiptoeing
in and out behind boxes and walls trying to clip an errant bit of an enemy’s clothing. You’re
granted the mercy of going three laps in the game’s infamous race mission as opposed to five.
And I’ll admit there was initially a part of me that worried that such streamlining would
somehow rob the game of its identity—I mean one could argue that it was precisely this
sanded-down, generic approach that resulted in developer Hangar 13’s previous effort, Mafia 3,
becoming the painfully disappointing open-world checklist ticker that it is.
But what you realise upon diving deeper is that that friction that so grounded
players in the time period of previous games still very much exists—you’re still driving
period-appropriate clunkers through an absurdly detailed city, carrying out deliberately linear
missions amounting to fairly menial labour by open world crime game standards and you have
to watch your speed while you do it—but all of it has been entirely refined, the fat has been
ripped away so as to maintain that realism, that tactility of the game’s setting without veering
into the downright irritating as was often the case in 2002’s game. This is, by far,
the most fully realised Mafia game to exist at this point; it is honestly pretty phenomenal
storytelling as far as I’m concerned—even if it isn’t the most faithful in its delivery.
Because what’s perhaps wildest about this whole scenario is that Hangar 13 are entirely unafraid
to make numerous subtle, but fundamental changes to the game’s very narrative—poking
and prodding at every minute detail to more firmly establish the game’s cultural context, to expand
on themes and breathe an atmosphere into its setting in a way that the original was often too
busy beating you down to fully capitalise on. But despite how fundamental these changes often are,
you wouldn’t necessarily know it without going back to the original for direct comparison—most
of them emerge from the slightest of shifts in the way that scenes are framed, for example.
I first noticed this in the game’s intro—the establishment of its framing device wherein
protagonist Tommy tells his story to Detective Norman in search of protection from what we
assume are his now former employers. Where the original saw Tommy meet Norman in the café,
the roles are merely reversed here but despite being such a simple change,
the effect is significant; enlivening the rather robotic transactional exchange that
opened 2002’s game. Norman is now making his way across town, following a lead he’s skeptical of,
only to find a desperate and paranoid Tommy nervously chain-smoking in the corner;
how long has he been waiting here for? How long has he been sweating it out? The café itself is no
longer just a convenient meeting place, it’s one of the few environments in which Tommy can hide.
This one detail completely alters the dynamic of the scene, the framing device for the entire game;
giving it so much more energy, a palpable tension that just wasn’t there before.
And this kind of attention to detail only continues to make itself apparent the further you
get in the game, exemplifying that, despite having previously made the worst game in the franchise by
far, Hangar 13 still seem to firmly grasp exactly what makes Mafia tick at its best. For example,
if I had to define a key characteristic of Mafia’s identity, it’s that there isn’t
really any one foe to speak of that you could readily identify as the defining antagonist.
Rival boss Morello is set up as a boogeyman of sorts but his physical presence is rarely felt.
Instead, the threat has always been more existential than that; it’s the growing
realisation Tommy has that the jobs he’s doing aren’t getting any more glamorous;
just more dangerous as the wider culture shifts around him and his associates;
spurred on by the ever-evolving, unpredictable whims of the corrupt forces of power—the police,
the government, etc. In short, the key struggle of Mafia is an almost Red Dead-esque resistance
towards the changing of the times. But where the original game made time
a very literal threat—as you raced to your objective, getting pulled over by the cops
and anxiously watching the seconds tick away—in Definitive Edition it’s slightly more abstract;
with the numerous alterations to the game’s storytelling making clear that the period of
this game’s drama was one of absolute turmoil. Indeed, merely hinted at in the original through
the occasional mission where you’d pick up crates of liquor or you’d drive past seemingly well-to-do
people huddled around barrel fires, the real enemy here is prohibition and the end of it,
it’s the Great Depression. The hustle and bustle of the original Salieri’s bar shifts
to the uncomfortable quiet of a business robbed of its lifeblood; the addition of delightfully
brief newspaper clippings talk of spiralling unemployment and crippling national debt. Just
by driving around in the game’s second mission you’ll see that Tommy’s passengers are no longer
random nondescript NPCs, they’re defined people in their own right from various walks of life
informing you through their banter exactly how this dire situation is affecting different types
of people and establishing the social hierarchies that result from that.
And these kind of details lead to the main thesis statement of Mafia—that if Mafia 2
saw protagonist Vito lured by the promise of the high life that was very deliberately kept
just out of his reach to keep him in his subservient place, the Definitive Edition
of 1 really leans into this idea that said high life seemingly never existed in the first place.
In his confession to Norman, Tommy will brush over brief periods of carefree happiness,
but when we actually control him it seems as if there’s very little to differentiate his
current job from his old taxi gig, outside of the number of bodies and growing existential anxiety.
Far from the fairly one-dimensional mob boss we see in the original,
the Salieri we encounter here is characterised far more as the same kind of struggling businessman
seen in any other occupation during this time—turning to you to make things right
so that he can simply maintain payroll. Tommy’s home life doesn’t fare much better,
with his relationship with love interest Sarah, a huge portion of his life, equally skimmed past
in scant, fairly passionless exchanges. Aside from making a very welcome change to,
well… this, it all circles back around, calling into question Tommy’s reliability as a narrator
in a way that the, shall we say, less evocative performances seen in the original didn’t.
For me these huge jumps in Tommy’s version of events, the redaction of… certain details really
highlighted the fact that this is Tommy specifically telling this story to a cop,
unsure if Norman is even going to protect his family at this point—Tom is already in way over
his head and, to a certain extent, you get the feeling that he might be deliberately keeping
things close to his chest; perhaps to cover his back in case things go south, or maybe
it’s simply the remnants of the mafioso mindset he’s lived in for so many years now. You know,
he’s ratting out his former business partners, but that doesn’t mean he’s suddenly pals with the cops
either—maybe Tommy decides who gets to know about his wife and you ain’t one of them, capisce?!
None of this is outright stated by the game—instead the changes made to how these
relationships are set up and played out against the newly emphasised backdrop of this tumultuous
time period still leave enough room for you to question the wider implications of how the story
develops, which, if you’ve watched this channel for any length of time, you’ll know is basically
my favourite narrative trick in all of fiction. It’s an incredibly fine line to walk—giving
players more explicit context without beating them over the head with it—but Hangar 13 really
does a remarkable job weaving it all together. Contrast this with Mafia 3, whose noble attempts
to confront the blight of racism were undermined by the totally superficial foregrounding of it
all. The potentially interesting alert system letting Lincoln know that the cops always had
their eye on him specifically, clashed with the the woefully paint-by-numbers open world structure
that more-or-less provided Lincoln a step-by-step checklist, a clear path to his revenge and to
take whatever he saw fit, turning him into a powerhouse and rendering said cops zero threat.
In Definitive Edition, it seems obvious that Tommy never feels like he can change anything,
that he’s really at the end of his rope here, and because it’s all backed up with mission and world
design that places you in the shoes of a gangster spiralling out of his depth, you’re never allowed
to feel like you could do anything to change it either. One job ends, the next begins—you’re
never given any real chance to relax, let alone combat any one enemy or establishment that would
make your life any better. Like everyone else in this world, you’re just trying to get by;
to adapt to circumstances outwith your control. And with newly added radio stations playing the
same kind of big band and swing hits you’d find in a Fallout title, not only are said commutes
made slightly less monotonous, but the act of driving through the city takes on a similar kind
of macabre humour, I guess. There’s the feeling that you’re witnessing the city, this veneer of
capitalist excess and success, experience a prolonged, lethargic apocalyptic decline,
and as time goes on and you start to see the news cover things like the growing influence of a
certain European political figure, you’re solemnly reminded that things are going to get a whole lot
worse in this world before they get any better. This is that kind of grim mundanity that I
absolutely adore about the first two Mafia games, captured so well by Definitive
Edition—consistently subverting that well-worn open world trope that whatever territory you find
yourself in is yours for the taking if you just kill your way to the top. Rather, Mafia is an open
world in the sense that Driver 2 was technically an open world, I suppose—you can get out of your
car and wander about if you want, but there’s no real reason to—you’ve got a job to do. And
so Lost Heaven becomes more of a worldbuilding device in itself—unbelievably dense with detail
in a way that benefits marvelously from the game’s impressive visual upgrades, but detail that you’ll
mainly see fly by your car window. Lost Heaven is a look-but-don’t-touch affair and Tommy’s
eyes are firmly on the prize of making it through another day, of getting through one more commute.
In this sense Definitive Edition sees Hangar 13 paint an incredibly cohesive picture of a city,
a time period, a series of national crises all converging to bolster this story of one particular
gangster and it is utterly delightful to throw yourself into this thematic, systematic melange.
But it’s also important to consider that, when you individually examine the gameplay systems holding
everything up, it’s definitely a “greater than the sum of its parts” situation. At the core of
Definitive Edition’s action is a functional if unremarkable third person shooter that,
while infinitely less unwieldy than its source material, still feels a little clunky
in its stealth, melee and cover mechanics when held up against its contemporaries.
Technically, it’s also a mixed bag, with moments of serene beauty where the atmosphere just oozes
out of the screen frequently bumping up against other instances where that veil of humanity and
vitality doesn’t so much slip away as get dragged round the back and riddled
with tommy gun fire. But above all else, what dates this game even further than the technical
hiccups is just how hard Mafia’s story still tries to set Tommy up as the one moralistic
dude navigating a sea of depravity; someone who hesitates before shakily pulling the trigger;
who will actively stop people in their tracks if the plan involves murdering innocents and
will be visibly shaken when he inevitably ends up doing so… in cutscenes at least.
See, this is all despite gameplay that forces you to gun down hundreds of people in your path,
that allows you to run over pedestrians without a moment’s hesitation. As I’ve talked about quite
recently, this kind of inconsistency is hardly a dealbreaker, but when the game otherwise so
precisely attempts to weave together its story and mechanics in the name of atmosphere, said
inconsistency does tend to stick out in a way I’m not sure it necessarily would have back in 2002.
But it says a lot that in a sea of changes made to the original game, this is just one example where
I wish they’d actually gone further, to further clean up the vestiges of the game’s early PC
origins. Because while it might not be the most word-for-word retelling of the original story,
it’s hard not to think that in pretty much every regard these alterations make for a
major improvement overall. The original played like a janky 1930’s gangster simulator where
the story seemed like a means of allowing you to experience these deliberately restrictive
systems and mechanics. Definitive Edition is the other way around; focused on using those
more prickly aspects of the game’s design to really bring that surrounding story to life.
It is, on many levels, a pretty different story to the one told in the first game. More than a
remaster, more than a remake even, it’s a complete overhaul, a reimagining. And yet,
it feels more true to the series’ utterly unique identity than anything released after 2010;
removing some of the barriers to entry of the original without dumbing anything down or
sanding away those edges completely; changing the very foundation of certain scenes, while somehow
feeling completely respectful of the source. By so fully realising the original’s thematic potential,
Hangar 13 make a confident statement that this is not only the definitive version of Mafia 1—it’s
arguably up there as one of the definitive pieces of crime fiction games in general have to offer.
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Thank you to Skillshare for sponsoring this video, and I hope you all enjoyed this piece about Mafia!
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