25 Years of Mafia Video Games: An Oral History

It’s somewhat sobering to think that the Mafia franchise is nearly a quarter of a century old. Many of the people who make the games have been working on it for even longer. What began life in 2002 with the release of Illusion Softworks’ Mafia has become a significant franchise for publisher 2K. And, like most other series of similar vintage, Mafia has seen its ups and downs. But it is still alive and kicking, even now, 25 years later.

Today, August 14, 2K releases Mafia: The Omertà Collection, which includes Mafia: The Old Country Definitive Edition, Mafia: Definitive Edition, Mafia 2: Definitive Edition, and Mafia 3: Definitive Edition. There’s also a free update for Mafia: Definitive Edition on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S to add 60 frames-per-second gameplay — something fans have been crying out for for years. It’s a busy time indeed for the Mafia franchise and its developer, Hangar 13.

It is impossible to provide a comprehensive 'making of' the entire franchise and all its years of development in a single hour-long interview, but I gave it a good shot when I sat down to talk to Hangar 13 president Nick Baynes, Hangar 13 general manager Roman Hladík, Mafia: The Old Country game director Alex Cox, and cinematics director Tomas Hrebicek. Roman and Tomas, by the way, have worked on Mafia from the very beginning, joining the Czech Republic studio Illusion Softworks in the city of Brno to shape what would become the first Mafia video game. They’ve seen it all: the acquisition from 2K parent company Take-Two in 2008, the rebrand to 2K Czech, and the merger into 2K’s Hangar 13 in 2017, and they are still here, still making Mafia games.

So, if you’ve got even a passing interest in the Mafia games, I hope you find something interesting in the interview below. We discuss all the main games and the challenges they faced, get some insight into the decisions that were made at the time, and there’s even room for a little Mafia tease for the future.

Mafia 1

IGN: I think the obvious starting point is at the beginning, the initial premise of what Mafia was setting out to do. Is it possible to trace that line to where it is now and how it's evolved?

Roman Hladík: If I go back to the early times of Illusion Softworks, which was the indie studio where it all started, we joined it probably in 1998, if I remember well. It was at a time when the studio was already working on Hidden & Dangerous 1, the game, and the owner of the studio wanted to extend the business and basically establish another group. So he called a couple of us, but we were really young folks at the time with very little experience of making games as hobbies. And first we were thinking about something completely different, but then the owner of the studio went to an exhibition and came back with the idea or with the information that the game we were considering, many other similar games were being developed at the time.

We started to think about a game that would be about crime, police, maybe a policeman investigating the crime, but it flipped around later on. And I think it was Daniel Vávra who brought the idea that there would be a strong story, which was not that common at the time. And so it happened that the first original Mafia was mostly appreciated for the story, for combining the gameplay elements and the story.

I don't think that was a clear intention at the beginning. It just happened, how the ideas were coming together and what we liked to play and so on. So it was, I would say, pure passion at that time driving us to deliver something like that. And I have to say that we were all a little bit naive at the time. We didn't know what we were going to do. So we also struggled a lot to finish the game. It took us four, four-and-a-half years probably, and it was all right back then.

Tomas Hrebicek: I remember we liked the gangster movies, the romance behind it. So we were watching Godfather, Miller's Crossing, and Goodfellas. So I think that all combined also the idea and we were starting to talk about that kind of game and the story and enjoy the romantic part of the gangsters, but also to show the dark sides of it. And as Roman said, this time we want to bring this super strong story, but also it was the first time we started to do the cinematography in the games. I believe we were the first ones to pay so much attention to the cinematics part in that. So as Roman said, we were pretty young, naive, and we were learning. Myself, I was responsible for the cinematics, but I didn't have any school on that. I was just watching movies, analyzing them shot by shot. And all of us were just learning on the way and trying to do the best.

Roman Hladík: And it's fair to say that it was Tomas who brought the cinematic part to the game, and he does it still today basically on all the Mafias.

IGN: How did you feel coming off the back of the first Mafia? Did its success take anyone by surprise? Was there a feeling even then that this was going to be a long-running franchise and you had to start plotting things out in a grander sense?

Roman Hladík: I would say for us as developers, it came as a surprise. We didn't expect this original Mafia to be this successful. Maybe the owner, Petr Vochozka, at that time was hoping for a huge success. But I think to all of us who were on the team, it came as a surprise. Because finishing a game — and I think it's still the same — at some point it feels a little bit endless. You are still debugging and iterating on the game and we are already tired and frustrated. So I would say we had that negative feeling in ourselves.

But then when it came out and players appreciate it, it's always a pleasure to feel that feedback. If the game is well received, then you're getting the positive feedback. So definitely it was, at least for me, a surprise. And because it was a commercial success as well, it was quite obvious that we are going to do the second one.

Alex Cox: I started working on the franchise a couple of years after this was, but one thing that always struck me is how much of a cultural export Mafia was from the Czech Republic, at the time, a country that was still 10 years or so independent. And if we think about Tomb Raider and how that was for the UK as something that broke out as a video game property, I think that's double the case for Mafia from the Czech Republic, from a relatively small country in Central Europe, for the games being internationally successful was quite a big deal for you guys, I assume.

When I visited the country for the first time, I was very surprised at how many people knew Mafia when, for example, you're in a taxi and the taxi driver knows the franchise. It was much, much more high profile than I was expecting when I arrived there. So I don't know whether you guys enjoy any degree of celebrity in a way that might be surprising to people outside of Czech?

Tomas Hrebicek: I would say it took us by surprise because as Roman said, it took us so much time to develop the first game. I'm not happy with the output until I get the positive feedback from the audience. So I see a lot of things we can improve always. And also I would say the marketing was not back then, it was not that strong in America. And so it was a huge positive surprise how widely and internationally Mafia was known. So as Roman said, it was a commercial success, so that opened the door to Mafia 2. And I think Alex, you joined towards the end or the middle of Mafia 2?

Alex Cox: Around the middle, yes. I was working for 2K at the time and I joined the project when 2K were going to acquire Illusion. The game had been in development for several years with Illusion as an independent studio. Take-Two had worked with Illusion on many games before, including Hidden & Dangerous. And so there was a close commercial relationship between the studio and the publisher. And because 2K had a lot of faith in Mafia 2 in particular, the studio was acquired and Illusion became 2K Czech a couple of years before Mafia 2 was shipped. And that was when I first joined the story as a producer at the time at 2K.

Mafia 2

Roman Hladík: As Alex mentioned, it took us seven years to develop the second Mafia, which was even more than the first one. And why I think it happened? After the success of the original Mafia, we got a feeling that now we can do whatever we want. And the ambitions were really high. So I would say we set up the design and the ambitions for our second Mafia really high. And then obviously it was maybe a bit too big a challenge for the team to work it out. And also the technology has developed over the time. The competition was stronger and so on. So that was all the reasons why it took seven years. Well, again, we made it in the end, but it was also a long time and not easy time, all the time.

Alex Cox: But you mentioned the competition. It's interesting, isn't it? If we cast our minds back to that time, open world crime games were very popular. There were a lot of other franchises out there as well trying to do the same kind of thing. And there was a transition, wasn't there? Because the original Mafia was primarily a PC game. It was a game that was developed on PC. It had an awkward console port, but actually it gained a lot of its popularity within the PC audience because it was the first open-world crime game that was available on PC. Obviously had the cinematic approach you guys discussed.

But at the time, the big challenge, I think, was to move the game from its PC roots. We were in the pre-Steam era there. So PC was a relatively limited market. And there was a big commercial push to make the game into a console game to get out there alongside the other open-world crime games that were breaking out in the mass market.

And that was one of the big technological challenges, wasn't it? Because halfway through development, there was a big engine change, wasn't there? To go from RenderWare to start with and then onto your own engine, which contributes to the delays and create quite a lot of complexity and challenges there?

Roman Hladík: That's all correct. It was technology which was challenging, and it was also the growth of the studio, the team. Because when we were finishing Mafia 1, it was around maybe 30 people. But then on Mafia 2, we grew up to almost 200, if I remember well. So it was also about managing the bigger team and all the challenges which are coming with that.

Nick Baynes: At that time, I think I'm right in saying the entire team was in Czech?

Alex Cox: That's right. The whole team was in Czech. I mean, obviously the studio’s evolved over the course of time to be much more international, but there was a big culture change as well, wasn't there at that time as I remember. I was working for the publisher. We became very much more closely involved with development when Illusion joined the 2K group. And I think there was a big culture change for you guys there as well, wasn't there, in terms of how to adapt to something like a more modern game development studio.

Tomas Hrebicek: It was a great transition from this just closed Czech-only studio in Mafia 1, transitioned through Mafia 2, partially international because we have cooperation with 2K publishing. For example, all the motion capture for the first two games were happening purely in Czech Republic. And then the English performance was done by dubbing ADR post-pro.

During Mafia 2, we came already to sound booth studios together and we spent months recording voiceovers, playing the real dubbing of the cinematics. And the difference is really visible between the Mafia 1 and Mafia 2. So the cooperation was much closer. And then on Mafia 3, we worked with American actors in an American studio. So there was transition over the games.

Alex Cox: That's really interesting, isn't it? Because I remember the first game was translated from Czech, Daniel Vávra’s script in Czech, and then someone in the UK fixed up some typos and text issues in the script. In the second game, actually an American scriptwriter took the script, didn't they? And they spent months and months reworking it and actually working with the talent in the studio. So that was a big evolution in terms of the creative quality of the VO. And then obviously you guys were working to the VO when you were doing the mocap, so that was interesting.

And then by the time we got to three, of course, yeah, we were doing all of that creative production side of things had largely moved to America. So again, there was I'd say a step up in terms of certainly the Americanization aspect of it. It was quite unusual for you guys to be writing American games and stories set in America from Czech Republic, obviously, with a lot of references to TV shows and movies rather than lived experiences.

Tomas Hrebicek: What's funny, a lot of stuff in original Mafia 1 is from Brno, like the church and all that stuff. So we were just trying to get the American feeling from the photos from the books, but all the influences were taken in Brno, here around. On Mafia 2 and Mafia 3, we are able already to travel and take the pictures and real stuff in America.

IGN: How do you feel about Mafia 2 looking back, good and bad? Is there anything there that you think you could have perhaps done slightly differently?

Roman Hladík: Well, it's difficult to say. I have to say that I like the Mafia 2 a lot. Because I think we managed to get the atmosphere of an American city better than what we did in the first one, for the reasons which Tomas mentioned. Because no one of us was traveling to U.S. before. So with Mafia 2, we already had a chance and we tried to do our best to capture that in the game. It's always stylized. The city is much smaller than the real cities, whatever, but I think we got it in a much better way.

I think we've been criticized at the time that we are not using the open world as much as we should. That was maybe what was dragging our scores a little bit lower during the release. But it's interesting that over the time people appreciate Mafia 2 more and more. They don't see these flaws and they enjoyed the story, which is great. So I think there was a little bit of controversy in the Mafia 2 was released because it probably didn't match all the expectations from players, but it still delivered a very solid entertainment story and activities, which players started to like. I don't know how to say that. It's always about the expectations versus the reality, and there was a little bit of gap there. So I wish we could deliver more. But as we said before, it was a challenging project for all of us and we did our best, and that's what was released in the end.

So maybe if we do it these days, we would probably deliver more of the content to the open world. But that's all I can say probably.

Alex Cox: At the time, a lot of games were expanding outwards, weren't they? So I think what you say there Roman is completely true. What players expected and what they got was not quite the same thing, but it's not because of what we tried to — I think we were quite honest about what the game was when we launched it — but players quite reasonably had an expectation, I think, particularly in terms of more open-world content.

There were stories about we cut lots of stuff out of the game and things like that as well, which was swirling around after launch, which were quite exaggerated. I mean, to Roman’s point, it was a difficult game to launch and we did have to trim a bit of scope, but we didn't change the game dramatically from a huge open-world game to what it was. I mean, we are talking about a little bit of side content only really.

Looking back on it now, I completely agree with Roman. It's the game that came closest, I think, to matching everybody's fantasy in their mind about what they see when they see Mafia on a box. I might be repeating something that Daniel Vávra said in the past, that Mafia 2 was almost his revision of Mafia 1 almost to improve and resolve issues that he had with the first game and wanting to do better. And I think he succeeded there in terms of the story. And it hit that kind of Goodfellas kind of vibe, which resonated well in terms of the story, in terms of the tone, in terms of the setting and everything like that landed very well.

I just think it suffered a little bit from players' expectations at the time, when more was certainly considered better in almost every way for an open-world game. But yeah, I still think it's remembered very fondly, and I think for all of the right reasons, that's it’s lasted the test of time.

Roman Hladík: What I think worked well in Mafia 2 was this chemistry between the main character, Vito, and his fellow Joe Barbaro. That's probably something which people liked and it was really fun to see the story based on those two characters that works still today, I believe, when people play it.

Mafia 3

IGN: When it was decided that Mafia 3 would follow, what were you trying to achieve? It followed six years after Mafia 2, so there was a huge amount of development time there as well. It'd be great to get some insight into the ups and downs of that.

Alex Cox: Mafia 3 was a long journey, and actually that did coincide with another evolution of the studio structure as well. So my part of the story, I started working at the studio as a designer at that point so I can talk as a developer for Mafia 3. We started on a version of Mafia 3 in the Czech Republic. So there was a prototype version of Mafia 3, an earlier version of the game that ultimately we shipped, that we worked on for a couple of years after Mafia 2. And the goal was to go much more open world. So that was our whole angle on it. There was a story. Again, the story was quite a lot different than the one we ultimately shipped, but it did involve the New Orleans setting that we ultimately used for Mafia 3.

And again, it had quite a different design. We were going quite heavily into the idea of story optionality, story choices and things like that. There was a different hero. It was much more focused on the Italian Mafia kind of vibe, and it was more of a direct sequence to Mafia 2.

But that project for one reason or another fell on stony ground. We had some development challenges there, particularly on the technical side. Our ambition started to overreach because we were still basically building on top of the Mafia 2 engine, and our ambitions were starting to overreach what we were able to technically do, particularly in terms of — actually talk about quite straightforward development concerns — it was becoming harder and harder for us to recruit developers because the tech was so idiosyncratic. While a lot of the broad swathe of game development was moving to middleware and standardized editors and things like that in terms of how to develop, our internal technology was becoming increasingly difficult to recruit.

And also at the time, obviously 15 years ago, we were requiring people to move to the Czech Republic. It was more and more difficult for us to recruit internationally as well. And that was becoming a bigger need because we needed to bring in talent to help to meet modern expectations for open-world games. So we had various challenges there that ultimately resulted in a new studio being formed, and the studio being rebranded from 2K Czech to Hangar 13, the studio that shipped Mafia 3, and a new studio location being opened in California in Novato. And there was a reboot of the project at that point. We focused in on the New Orleans story part of the story from the first version of the game, but the reboot took a significantly different direction. And the new studio head who is no longer with us, Haden Blackman, who was also the creative leader of the project, took over.

And so that ultimately over the course of the next three or so years after that led to Mafia 3. So the same kind of design intent, to move Mafia more towards an open-world format. But the story changed significantly, about the civil rights storyline, Lincoln Clay as the hero, the idea of the black mafia versus the Italian mafia as the enemy. All of those concepts came in alongside a big shift in terms of the game design approach to, let's say, maximum open world, if we were going to describe it kindly.

Roman Hladík: I think that was the important change during the development, that the new creative mind behind the Mafia was Haden Blackman. But the studio, which at the time was formed at Novato, California, was not purely new people coming. It was also a lot of people moving from Czech to the U.S. who were then working from there. So it was a mixture of original Mafia developers and new people coming to California to work on Mafia 3.

Nick Baynes: And of course the team back in Czech continued to exist, so it was an extension of that team, right?

Alex Cox: Yes. And that was, again, another big culture change for the studio. The California studio brought in an awful lot of talent as well. We had the benefit of being able to recruit from places like LucasArts and others in the Bay Area. So that brought a lot of expertise onto the team, which was great.

Mafia 3 was another hard development. And unfortunately, I think our ambition, again, was ultimately what held the project back in the end. The superb story, all of the same strengths as the previous two titles. I think Haden and the narrative team did a great job in presenting this civil rights storyline, treading quite a tightrope there of putting that on the screen in a way that I think most games would shy away from. And so we're very proud of how that aspect of the project landed. It's just a bit of a shame that — I don't think there's any secret here to say that the open-world elements of the game actually ended up holding it back despite being something that we'd invested heavily in.

But the positive part of that story — the game did okay only, commercially, critically a little bit disappointing — but the engine, the technical aspect of the game, we did manage to solve, and our internal technology really got up to a great standard. And that actually in the end helped us to move onto the path we're on now, because that helped us to do Mafia: Definitive Edition and the remake of Mafia, which we did several years later off the back of the Mafia 3 technology. So there was a nice unexpected benefit to that once we did finish that game.

Roman Hladík: Something the team in California brought to Mafia, it was a little bit better set in the U.S. environment, I would say. We did Mafia in Europe, and it was always our stylized view of how the American cities are looking like, how the life is in those cities and how the American mafia works. So I think having Haden Blackman in charge and having so many designers in California, it allowed us to deliver more on what… I would say for U.S. market, it was suddenly not a European view of their country. It was more fitting the U.S. customers, I would say. That's what happened as well with Mafia 3. For the first time we used the likeness of the actors, which was not the case in previous Mafias.

IGN: Was the initial focus on open world a reaction to Mafia 2? Was it about the trends at the time? Why was that the big investment?

Roman Hladík: I think it was the feedback from 2. And to be honest, for us as developers, when you are building a huge city, you want to use it, you want to deliver other stories, other activities within that city. And what constrained us on 2 was our ability to deliver on time, I would say. So it was quite obvious that we are going to try in a better way in the Mafia 3. And I think it did well. Maybe the activities in the open-world of Mafia 3 might be a little bit repetitive, but I think you can spend much, much more time in that game and enjoy the environment than it was in previous Mafias. So yes, definitely the feedback from the players was the driver.

Alex Cox: We've got quite a fractured audience actually now. Each of the Mafia games is somewhat different to the others. There's maybe a consistent core through the middle of narrative-driven action adventure, but each iteration of the game has brought in a new tranche of players to our audience base. And actually there are a sizable number, maybe a more silent number of players that like Mafia 3, like that kind of, let's say, Ubisoft style territory control style open-world that we focused on in that game. And it was quite successful for them, particularly in terms of providing lots of gameplay hours. Everything that Roman just mentioned, that did land well with a sizable proportion of players. And actually of all of the games that we've shipped, Mafia 3 has reached the most players by far. It was the biggest Mafia game that we ever did in terms of its scope, its scale, budget, its marketing, everything, and was successful relative to all of those factors.

And it was, I think, a reaction to Mafia 2 by and large. Certainly because of where games were at the time, pushing more open-world was seen as the way to make the game better and more successful, certainly by everybody. There was a widespread belief that this would succeed.

IGN: People do compare Mafia to GTA, rightly and wrongly. You see videos comparing the two games all the time. Has the comparison to GTA become a part of the Mafia franchise, irrespective of whether you’ve gone more open world or linear? Is that a thing that has factored into any thinking around what you do? Or is it just one of those things that happens online and isn't really reflective of the reality of the audience that you've built for the franchise?

Nick Baynes: I think that genuinely at the studio, we've got our own path. It genuinely never ever comes up in conversation as a touchpoint or steering our strategy or anything like that. I think obviously there's a lot of stories about that game out there right now because something's coming out later this year! But yeah, genuinely, I think it's an internet thing. It's not something the studio looks at. So I think I'm afraid there's not a rich vein of answers to give you for that.

Mafia: Definitive Edition

IGN: The Old Country went back on that open-world investment again to a more focused, linear game. It’s been out for a year now. How do you feel about it, and what development challenges did you face?

Nick Baynes: Around 2018 is when I and Brighton enters the scene, so I'm the new boy of eight years compared to these guys. But I think it'd be remiss, I think, to go straight to The Old Country without acknowledging the importance of Mafia: Definitive Edition as well. Because I think that if you look at Hangar 13 as a studio, it had gone off in a slightly different direction around the time the Brighton studio started. We were working on another game, but the Brighton studio was growing. We wanted to ship something because the game we're working on ultimately didn't ship, but it was quite a large, ambitious game. So we wanted to ship something as a studio. We wanted to find something to help grow Brighton and build the teams and how we all worked together.

And we felt that it was an appropriate time to build on the Mafia 3 engine and do a remake of Mafia 1, which I think actually was probably one of the first wave of the modern remakes. I think now obviously there's a lot of ground up remakes that are made, but I think when we were doing Mafia: Definitive Edition, we were certainly one of the first ones I think came out of that. And that was interesting because firstly, it created this really great working relationship and team structure between the UK office and Czech, which is where the Mafia games are made pretty much exclusively these days. It also showed us actually the amount of love that came back for that game in terms of just the story focus, the rough size of it in terms of scope. And so when the studio did go through a few more changes a couple of years later and we were looking at what we wanted to do with the franchise, it felt like it was a good time to — you talked earlier about the through line — to go back to that almost to what made Mafia great in the first place. Very tight, focused, authentic narrative stories that really immersed the player. And for us, we were going into a new engine. We were going back to the origin of Mafia. It was very much a case of let's deliver a classic Mafia story and then grow it from there.

And by grow it from there, what I mean is also the additional content we worked on over the last year in terms of, when you add in the DLC and the extra free ride content and the open-world content that you can access there, suddenly it feels like a much deeper package. That was just to add that context in the middle of the jump from Mafia 3 to The Old Country.

Alex Cox: And I do think there's an interesting part of the story there because, coming back to what you were saying earlier on about the reaction to Mafia 2, well the reaction to Mafia 3 is also what's triggered this next part. So the reaction to Mafia 3 was questionable, of course, we've seen that in the reviews. And so the game that Nick alluded to was a reaction to that. It was a different game. It was a very different genre, but it was something that struggled to find its path internally. And over the course of several years was still in development when we decided to go back to Mafia and do what was effectively a side project at the time.

But actually, as it turned out, that other project never really found its path. But what did find its path was actually going back to the roots of Mafia and rediscovering something that, as Nick said, connected everybody in the studio. We knew what we were making. It was actually a game that by and large everybody in the studio wanted to make. It was playing to our strengths. We were learning a lot of lessons there in terms of trying to do a game in a different genre with mechanics and technology that we don't know how to do. It's much more challenging than maybe people anticipated. And finding a safe haven back in Mafia was great for us.

But then as we did the game — and that was actually very successful as well — and so when the other project faltered in the end and did result in some studio reorganization, we found a new north star in terms of designing back around Mafia. But also the principles that made the original Mafia and the remake successful — and it did do quite well critically and it did well commercially — was that linear storytelling mode. It still had its audience. The players of all of the previous Mafia games came back to it and they enjoyed playing it.

And so that set the scene really for The Old Country, because while The Old Country didn't increase in terms of scope or technical ambition, under the hood it was because actually we discarded the Mafia 3 engine and we moved to Unreal. And so, while on the screen the game looks smaller and more focused, actually a lot of development effort went into rebuilding the engine completely. So that's something that players don't see of course on the screen. And we were trying as far as possible to make it feel, look, and play like a next-gen Mafia title. But that kind of under the hood investment in having to basically rebuild the whole engine under the hood is what that game was partly about strategically in addition to moving the franchise forward in a new way.

Mafia: The Old Country

Nick Baynes: A couple of times during this conversation we've talked about maybe Mafia 2 not quite meeting players' expectations, or Mafia 3 maybe going in a way that some people liked, but other people felt it had stumbled in certain areas. I think that the franchise throughout from the very, very beginning, the fact that we've had such strong characters, such compelling stories and people fall in love with the worlds, I think this is why all of our games, the audience, the affection for the games grows over time. And I think it's like, even when there has been the odd mismatched expectation at release, you go on Reddit now and you see people debating which one's their favorite Mafia game, and you'll quite often get four different answers. There's a size book group that will say Mafia 3 is the best Mafia game. And a sizeable group will say Mafia 2 is the best match game.

The reason why it does stick with people and why it does grow over time is that people do love these stories and they do love the characters. And that was really one of the things we wanted to do with The Old Country. In fact, it was a very big thing for us at the start: the importance of finding a protagonist that players are going to really embrace and want to live with them and play the game in their shoes. And we certainly saw that with Enzo. I think Alex and the team did a great job with all the characters in The Old Country. The cast of characters is probably the strongest we've had in terms of number of strong characters that people have really fallen in love with. It's about playing to our strengths and making sure we're capturing all the ingredients of what really is the essence of Mafia.

Roman Hladík: It's interesting to see the reactions from the players. Because these days people are playing almost endless games with endless grind, they really appreciated a shorter, more intensive story. And obviously there are also people who want to stay within the world we've built and enjoy it a little bit more. And for them, we released the free ride and now the DLC. So I think it's also about the market developing somehow. And the appetite for huge games is also limited, and they might be missing the other segment which we are trying to get to.

Alex Cox: Looking back on the game now, I think there's a very warm reaction to those characters. And I think that, Roman, you mentioned earlier on Vito and Joe, Lincoln, this is the core of every successful narrative adventure game, isn't it? Ultimately, it does boil down to the story basics, things like the characters are what really sticks with players. And they've become already in the last year part of the firmament of characters that the community refers to. And that benefit of being, let's say, a surviving franchise, a franchise that somehow has survived all of these challenges and the changes in the market, and we're still able to make Mafia games now is something we're very grateful for.

Because of course we do have this big community. You see other franchises that have been around for this kind of time period as well, they've built up such a big community of players that have had great memories of playing them over the years that to a large extent they become a little bit self-sustaining, don't they? That's something that we've ground out over a long period of time, and we're very grateful for that, I think, to be able to still be able to make Mafia games now.

Mafia: The Omertà Collection

IGN: What can you tell me about the Mafia: The Omertà Collection?

Nick Baynes: It collects all of the Definitive Editions alongside Mafia: The Old Country Definitive Edition, which is the original game plus the DLC and all the open world content that we've added in terms of free ride. It's a new way for players to pick up the whole franchise again.

We're also at the same time bringing out a PS5 and Xbox update to Mafia 1. Fans have been asking for 60 frames-per-second and a few quality-of-life, things like that. That’s free for all players.

We saw a lot of players come to Mafia for the first time with The Old Country and then go back and discover other games. So for people that haven't dipped their toe into all of the games that came before The Old County, this is a good opportunity for them to pick it up at that point.

IGN: What's next in terms of mainline releases or even remakes? You remade Mafia 1. I see fans all the time asking for a remake of Mafia 2, but also do you naturally move on to another Mafia sequel? Getting a sense of the future for this franchise and how you view it would be really great.

Nick Baynes: It's been interesting over the course of this conversation to think that this all started in 1998, and I only got involved eight years ago. I genuinely feel quite humbled and honored by the fact that we've still got so many people who've been there from the start, or some people who joined along the way. So we've spent all this time working on this franchise, working on telling these amazing stories. And we've obviously invested a lot in changing the engine and modernizing certain aspects of the way we make games with The Old Country. I'm not going to give you any details or talk about anything specifically about what's next, but I will say that we're very grateful that players perceived The Old Country so well, and it's given us the opportunity to continue to lead the way hopefully in telling these great narrative stories and keep on doing what we're doing. And so that's as much as you're going to get, I think!

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.