Mafia

Mafia from 2002 introduced players to the fictional metropolis of Lost Heaven at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s, during Prohibition and gang wars. The player takes on the role of taxi driver Tommy Angelo, whom chance draws into the service of a mafia family, and gradually guides him through a story about loyalty, power and their price. Unlike the popular action sandboxes of the time, Mafia was built on a linear, cinematically told story, where the open city served more as a backdrop than a playground for chaotic mayhem, even though between missions the player could drive through the streets and take in the shops or police patrols. The narrative itself is moreover framed as the confession of an aging Tommy to a detective, which lends the story a tinge of inevitability and sorrow.

In terms of gameplay, the game combines cover-based shooting, driving period automobiles with fairly realistic physics, and completing well-crafted missions, some of which — such as the notoriously difficult speed-limited race — have stuck in the memory of an entire generation of players. The individual chapters play out across varied settings, from docks and warehouses to lavish villas, while the game gradually reveals how deeply Tommy becomes entangled in the world of organized crime. The atmosphere is rounded out by carefully directed camera work, voice acting and a jazz soundtrack, which made Lost Heaven feel like a believably living world of the 1930s. The graphics were above average for their time, and the technical execution demonstrated the ambitions of what was then a little-known Czech studio, which earned international respect thanks to Mafia.

Mafia became one of the defining titles of the story-driven action genre with a city as backdrop, significantly influenced the direction of similar games over the following decade, and is still considered one of the best games ever made in the Czech Republic. The later 2020 remake only confirmed how strongly the story still resonates years later and how well it holds up against modern productions.