Mafia: The City Of Lost Heaven

The Cosa Nostra caper that subverted the Rockstar blueprint.

- Phil Iwaniuk

Back in 2001, Grand Theft Auto III gave players their first taste of the freedom 3D open-world games could offer, and it also laid out a design blueprint that developers are still iterating on nearly two decades later. It was a bullish production that seemed destined to dictate the direction of the entire industry in its wake, such was the glut of artless simulacra that followed. Over in Brno, though, they weren’t having it. Illusion Softworks had made its name with the wildly ambitious WWII action-strategy hybrid Hidden & Dangerous in 1999, and a year after GTAIII’s release it offered a dissenting voice on what gaming’s newfound expanses could be used for with Mafia: The City Of Lost Heaven. Like Liberty City, the game’s setting of Lost Heaven is a collage of familiar east coast bridges and skyscrapers, but it resolutely isn’t a playground bristling with distractions. Instead, Illusion built an enormous movie set alive with 1930s atmosphere which offered almost no diversions outside the main questline, and which hosted a straight-faced homage to mobster movies past and present.