Both the original, 2002 version of Mafia and the recently released Mafia: Definitive Edition begin with a familiar framing device. The game’s protagonist, a cookie-cutter Italian American mafioso named Tommy Angelo, heads to a diner and sits down with a police detective to relate the story of how he became a key player in a fictional 1930s mob family—and why he now wants out.
As Tommy introduces us to the Salieri family and describes his years-long climb up its ranks, the player is reminded of Ray Liotta’s Goodfellas narrator, Robert De Niro’s Casino voiceover, or any sundry Scorsese-influenced crime movie, from Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels to Road to Perdition, Layer Cake, and Lawless.
Familiar Tropes, Remastered
The rest of the game is equally reminiscent of mob movies players will likely have seen before. Its aesthetic references are Prohibition-era Chicago, abstracted here as the city of Lost Heaven, but, even within that framework, we get a sort of greatest hits of every gangster film beat.
Tommy is captivated by the excitement and glamor of finally making good money. His pals Paulie and Sam show him the ropes of a job that involves everything from debt collecting and bootlegging to carrying out hits and surviving ambushes. He gets married and moves into a nice house. He ends up disillusioned by the violence and danger of the mob and, in the frame story, decides to leave the business. It’s even noted at one point that he overcame a drinking problem after joining the mob, a cursory bit of backstory briefly mentioned perhaps to make sure another genre trope got its due.
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It isn’t that the game doesn’t fare well in its remaster on a moment to moment basis. In place of the original’s clunky controls, stiff character models, and flat cityscape, the new version features much improved driving and gun-fighting and wonderfully emotive faces. The game also features early 20th century urban landscapes that enhance the drama of tense conversations and the joy of traversing Lost Heaven’s streets.
Definitive Edition’s problems, however, are thornier ones than surface level complaints. They’re related to the wisdom of remakes and remasters as a whole. Everything that happens to Tommy and the Salieri family is something we’ve seen before. This was also the case in 2002, but now, 18 years later, going through Definitive Edition’s remade version of the same plot forces the question: Why, exactly, does Mafia’s story need to be retold for a modern audience at all?
What Does Mafia Have to Say Today?
While revisiting the welcomingly straightforward, fluff-free mission design of a 2002 open world game is enjoyable, the 2020 Mafia can’t overcome the fact that it’s ultimately a mobster game that replicates a plot first written nearly two decades ago. In the time since the original’s release, the genre has changed enormously. We’ve seen The Sopranos end, wrapping up a landmark examination of the mafia through the stacked lenses of class, race, sexuality, and turn of the millennium American culture. We’ve seen crime movies like Ridley Scott’s American Gangster and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Bronson explore the effects of the drug war and economic disenfranchisement and the drive to violence itself. Martin Scorsese seemingly bid farewell to the genre with last year’s The Irishman, a sprawling send-off that used the life of Bufalino family and Jimmy Hoffa associate Frank Sheeran as the framework for a powerful (and powerfully depressing) look at American crime, politics, and masculinity. Even the era Mafia is set within—the United States’ volatile 1930s—has been explored in depth over seasons of Boardwalk Empire and in movies like Michael Mann’s Public Enemies.
In light of this, even a gussied-up version of Mafia feels archaic and tired—yet another mob story in the post-Godfather mold, set apart mostly by its almost total lack of interest in women as characters, its cartoonish wise guy voice acting, and its devotion to replicating genre tropes without either skepticism or much of any insight.
If the original story was bold or thoughtful enough to make a greater impact on its genre—if it inspired rather than took inspiration from other sources—it might be easier to ignore that Definitive Edition is a game that’s preserved in early ‘00s amber. But its total adherence to what was already cliché 18 years ago means it feels even more hopelessly out of step in the current day.
The peril of such direct reference to other media is on full display in the remade Mafia. It forces players who come to the game for reasons other than to wade around in nostalgia to ask what there is to take away from the experience other than a bit of idle distraction. At the end of the game, Tommy has learned the decidedly unrevelatory lesson that crime doesn’t pay—that mafia families aren’t the same as real families and that a life of violence and material excess has a way of catching up to people in the end. The audience, having seen these same themes moved beyond (or handled more capably) in other mob stories, isn’t likely to be blown away.
Another Way Forward
Barring remakes and remasters, the most recent Mafia game to come from Definitive Edition developer Hangar 13 is 2016’s Mafia III—the story of a Black Vietnam veteran who returns to his home in a fictionalized version of 1960s Louisiana to take revenge on rival mobsters and, along the way, try to dismantle the white supremacist systems that control his city. In III, we see a different, more relevant version of the mob story, one that looked not to Coppola and Scorsese movies, but to ’60s and ’70s Blaxploitation films as inspiration for a crime game about the tragic proximity of decades-old systemic racism to the modern day. Mafia III felt vital. It felt like more than another crime game.
This sort of precedent makes it exciting to imagine Hangar 13 exploring a mafia or crime story that isn’t bound to aged material—to think of what the studio could do with a story that acknowledges where the genre has gone over the last 18 years and that looks to contemporary American society for inspiration as to the themes it wants to explore. Instead, for now at least, the series remains stuck in the past. It’s not that Mafia: Definitive Edition is a bad game, per se. It’s just one that feels in so many ways like we’ve played through it too many times before.