Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven



Thomas "Tommy" Angelo is an ordinary taxi driver working in the city of Lost Heaven during The Great Depression. One evening, he is caught in a wild car chase involving thugs of two rivaling mobs in town trying to kill each other. Forced to side with one party, he soon faces retribution from the other and has no choice but to start working for Don Salieri, whose men he saved earlier. This turns out to be a wise decision, since the other family is much worse. Thus begins Tommy's ascension from a simple cabbie to the best hitman in the entire mob.

Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven (2002) is a Third-Person Shooter developed by Illusion Softworks (later renamed 2K Czech), which combines an affectionate pastiche to the classic mafia movies (The Godfather and co.) with the Grand Theft Auto-like gameplay to produce a sweeping storyline with many sudden revelations, intense gunfights, and adrenaline-laden car chases. The sequel, Mafia II, came out in August 2010 and features the new setting of Empire Bay, a new protagonist and a supposedly Darker and Edgier storyline. Mafia II was then followed by Mafia III, which marked a stark departure from the series by putting players in the shoes of African-American Vietnam War veteran-turned-mobster Lincoln Clay along with the Civil Rights Era setting and social commentary towards white supremacism and criticism of the Vietnam War.

The game featured many unique features for its genre and time, including storing the aftermath of player actions in the city, even if the player left the location for a long time: e.g. if you shot at a car in Free Ride, it is possible to run into that same car later on in a different part of the city; abandoned cars and weapons stay where they are, instead of disappearing after a while as in Grand Theft Auto, etc. The game was noted for exceptional graphics for its time and a sophisticated police AI. However, despite being originally released for PC, the game is probably known to many for its god-awful PlayStation 2 and Xbox ports, which, due to a significant drop in processing and programming power, lost many of these unique perks in favour of simplified gameplay and truncated level design.

An eight-generation remake of the game, subtitled Definitive Edition, was announced for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2020, developed by Hangar 13 and published by 2K as part of the Mafia Trilogy compilation which comprised of re-releases of all three games: the aforementioned remake of the first game, a remaster of the second and an update for the third game. The Definitive Edition was released on September 25, 2020; it was originally slated for August 2020 but was delayed citing complications brought by the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Not to be confused with the card/roleplaying/mind game.

"Tommy Before He Decides To Join The Mob: "It's like my mom used to tell me: better to be poor and healthy than rich and dead." Tommy After He Decides To Join The Mob: "It's like I always say: better to live good, quick, and loaded.""
 * Anachronism Stew: It's the 1930s, but holds some design ideas, especially with vehicles, that reach as far forward as to the 1950s. Mostly not jarring, due to the Rule of Cool.
 * There is one Did Not Do the Research moment worth mentioning, namely early mission called "Molotov Party" in which Tommy uses Molotov Cocktails to wreck some rival family's cars. That part of the game takes place in 1930, whereas Molotovs didn't see widespread use until the Spanish Civil War in 1937. Granted, it could be hand waved by saying that Salieri's weapon master came up with the idea on his own, but Vincenzo audibly calls them Molotovs, a name coined by the Finns in their Winter War, ten years later.
 * Back Seats Are Just for Show
 * Bad Boss: Don Morello
 * Barbie Doll Anatomy: Two of the missions see Tommy encounter naked women in the game, namely Sarah and Michelle. Except that not only were their private parts obscured by a Scenery Censor, attempting to view them through hacking or by importing the .4DS files in a modelling tool such as 3DS Max or Zmodeler would yield Sarah and Michelle lacking nipples and other private bits. This perhaps saved Illusion Softworks the trouble of potentially being slapped with a harsher M rating descriptor for nudity.
 * Battle Butler/Two Shots From Behind the Bar: Luigi, the bartender, packs a shotgun behind the bar, and will not hesitate to gun you down if you attack any of your allies in the mid-mission stages.
 * Benevolent Boss: Don Salieri
 * Bloodstained-Glass Windows: After bursting in on the funeral of the guy you killed.
 * Bond One-Liner: "Man, that is one hot dame."
 * Career Killers: Tommy, Paulie, and Sam
 * The Consigliere: Frank
 * Cool Car: Most of the bonus cars in the Freeride mode.
 * Dashed Plotline: The original game is a collection of various episodes of a long Mob War spread over the years, recounted by the Player Character.
 * Deadly Distant Finale: See Downer Ending below.
 * Discretion Shot: At the end of an early level, The Running Man, there is one after the two mafiosos that have been chasing you go into Salieri's bar.
 * Downer Ending:.
 * In Mafia II,
 * Drugs Are Bad: Tommy explains to Norman in the third Intermezzo that the Cosa Nostra wanted nothing to do with drugs. Norman was left wondering as he assumed it didn't matter for criminals to do every evil deed just as long as it brought a lot of revenue for them, but Tommy further explained that unlike the Irish Mob and the Triads who are not above drug trafficking, the American Mafia simply avoided engaging in such activities as while they can indeed make a quick buck selling dope, a drug junkie or dealer who is caught by the police may end up ratting the family out and thus compromise the Mafia's secrecy.
 * Enemy-Detecting Radar: Oddly enough, but only for cars.
 * Every Car Is a Pinto: Cars are a lot less explosion-prone than most other games in the genre, but they'll still go up in a fireball if you put a hundred rounds or so into the engine, or shoot the fuel tank a few times.
 * Game Breaking Bug: A minor one, but Gangsters with shotguns in Free Ride, who start off driving a car, occasionally have a glitch where their shotguns rapid fire until they need to reload, which is deadly in close range, but not too much of a problem farther away.
 * Genre Shift: For some levels, especially "Happy Birthday!", the game turns into a Stealth Based Game--specifically, and appropriately, Hitman. "Visiting Rich People" is also stealth-driven, and can be somewhat compared to Splinter Cell in terms of mechanics and objectives.
 * Gotta Catch Em All: The cars in the game, which you need to collect to be able to access in other modes, and the Bonus Cars, which include a tank, Batmobile Expy, a hippie-mobile, and a fragile taxi that can go from 0 to 90 in less than a second.
 * That'd be the Phantom Corsair. As most other cars in Mafia, it is a real car with a few details changed and sans the marque name.
 * The Great Depression: The whole plot of the first Mafia, except the final scene of the epilogue, takes place between 1930 and 1938, dead smack in the middle of it.
 * Hide Your Children: Semi-averted. What appears to be a child shows up in the opening FMV, and a mission had Tommy Don't expect them to roam the streets in the main game and Freeride, though.
 * You can actually shoot and kill Alice and her mother in "Omerta" (whether by accident or deliberately), though it would unsurprisingly lead you to a game over.
 * How We Got Here: The entire story is a series of Tommy's flashbacks, as he relates his criminal past to Detective Norman.
 * Hyperspace Arsenal: Adverted. While Tommy can hide quite a few pistols in his coat, he can can only conceal one large gun at the time while carrying another in his hands. Picking up a third large weapon will prompt Tommy to drop the one he is currently carrying. The sequel plays this trope straight.
 * In Vehicle Invulnerability: Averted. Bullets can still hit you inside a car (although you gain some protection) and crashes will injure the occupants.
 * It Gets Easier
 * It's Like I Always Say...: Played with for irony:
 * It's Like I Always Say...: Played with for irony:


 * Loads and Loads of Loading: The PlayStation 2 port is the primary offender of this trope - it takes up to 5-10 minutes for a mission, a cutscene or Freeplay to start up. Add additional time to load up the New Ark/Hoboken district when crossing the Guiliano Bridge and the countryside (in some missions). Expect to clock half your game time waiting for the damn game to load. Averted with the PC version though - it omits loading screens in between map changes and only uses them for mission startups or cutscenes (and the time it takes is at least 10 seconds).
 * The Mafia: Where do we start?
 * Meaningful Name: Thomas Angelo from the city of Lost Heaven, eh?
 * Mob War
 * No One Should Survive That: Sergio. Four times. In the end Tommy decides to just chase him down and kill him rather than being discreet about it
 * One Bullet Clips: Mafia is one of those games that averts this trope, so be prepared to lose unused ammunition in your magazine when you reload. Oddly, this also applies to sawn-off shotguns, which are supposed to be fed with individual shells.
 * Only One Name: Played straight with the original, as most of the principal characters were only known by their first or last names. Salieri's full name wasn't revealed until the second game, and it wasn't until the Definitive Edition where said primary and secondary characters are finally given surnames, courtesy of collectable cigarette cards with their portraits and backstories: Paulie Lombardo, Sam Trapani, Sarah Marino, Luigi Marino...
 * Roof Hopping: Rooftop escape after blowing a hotel.
 * Stop Helping Me!: Though they are usually pretty intelligent, the main character's partners (especially Sam, for some reason) will occasionally get a bit too enthusiastic and run straight into trouble.
 * Super Drowning Skills
 * Third-Person Shooter
 * Tranquil Fury: Most characters get at least one. Morello gets a particularly creepy one partway through the game.
 * Video Game Cruelty Potential: You can run over people, shoot them, stab them, and cause gigantic amounts of mayhem, and the people will just keep taking it; even if you block traffic and then drag people out of their cars one at a time and shoot them, the rest will just keep honking their horns till they're dragged out too.
 * What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic: Angelo, Lost Heaven, etc.
 * The mob boss is named Salieri. In Amadeus, Salieri declared himself an enemy of God.
 * Why We Can't Have Nice Things: The final stage takes place in an art gallery. Nearly everything can be broken, and those that can't be can still show very large bullet holes. Feel free to wreak havoc on priceless works of art.


 * Adaptational Badass: Sarah is far from the Damsel in Distress shown in her original portrayal; while the original game has her try to flee from her would-be rapists, the remake portrays her as tougher and more independent, insisting on Tommy that she can hold out on her own. Indeed, she gave one of the thugs a Groin Attack to show Tommy that she's no mere pushover.
 * Adapted Out: He is notably absent in the remake, leaving the final two missions with Paulie and Tommy either using the weapons they already have in their possession or obtaining them somewhere else.
 * Age Lift: Alice Coletti. Whereas she appears as a small child in the original game, the remake ages her up to at least in her teens.
 * Aluminum Christmas Trees: A number of players found the inclusion of car radios jarring considering the time period--such audio units do exist, but given the state of electronics at the time with humongous and power-hungry vacuum tubes, they existed as bulky, ten-litre units mounted some place else in the car, and are ridiculously expensive. The inclusion of radios in all cars can be chalked up as Artistic License though, presumably for the player to enjoy the soundtrack and listen to the in-game news broadcasts for exposition's sake.
 * Anti-Frustration Features: The remake carries over the minimap, navigational icons and cover system from previous Illusion engine-based games, unlike in the original where you have to hold the map button every so often to navigate the city.
 * Deliberate Values Dissonance: Paulie and Sam are shown to be far more bigoted in As in Mafia III, Hangar 13 put up a disclaimer on startup that the game was developed by people of varying religious beliefs and ideologies, so as to allay concerns that they were glorifying racism or religious discrimination.
 * Drugs Are Bad: Salieri sternly warns Tommy and the others to stay away from drugs and would not accept the idea of any "dope fiends in this neighborhood."
 * Face Death with Dignity:
 * Kill It with Fire: Sergio's luck runs out when
 * Ink Suit Actor: Most of the principal cast was modelled after the actors who portrayed them, with Haden Blackman stating in an interview that "we looked for actors who not only sounded the part, but also looked the part and could perform on both the motion capture stage and in the VO booth."
 * Heroic Sacrifice:
 * Hide Your Children: Played straight in the remake. You can hear sounds of babies wailing during certain missions, but no child under the age of 18 shows up in-game at all, as Frank's daughter Alice is now in her teens as opposed to the six or seven-year old girl in the original. Whether this was due to concerns about portrayal of children in M-rated video games or not is unknown, even though Alice in the original only appeared in cutscenes and could only be interacted with in one mission strand; it could be that the Take-Two higher ups or Haden Blackman didn't want any such controversies with minors to crop up hence the decision to age up Alice (BioShock gained some controversy for its portrayal of little girls where the player is given the moral choice to save a Little Sister from being used as an ADAM harvester or kill them to gain extra abilities).
 * Hypocrite:
 * Jerkass:
 * Paulie is a lot more antagonistic towards Ralphie,
 * To an extent with Tommy himself. Compared to the original game where he was easily mortified by the things he had to do for the Salieri family, with Frank sensing hesitation from him, remarking that he only joined the family because he had no other choice, the remake portrays him as being far more confrontational and aggressive to the point of almost killing.
 * Momma's Boy: Ralph has a picture of him in his Sunday best alongside his mother in his quarters.
 * Mythology Gag: Speaking to Ralph just after the race during "Fair Play" has him tell Tommy that he made the race look easy, recalling that "most guys didn't make it to the finish" some twenty years prior, in reference to the horror stories of many a gamer who rage quit in frustration especially in the initial 1.0 release of the original game. It didn't help that the race is just as frustratingly hard if not harder should one go with the Classic difficulty.
 * Named by the Adaptation: Cigarette card collectables reveal the surnames of most of the characters in the game who were previously known only by their given names: Paulie Lombardo, Sam Trapani, Luigi Maino, Marcu Morello, Vincenzo Ricci...
 * Nintendo Hard: The Classic Mode, which is a nod to the original, frustrated players especially in the mission "Fair Play". Easier difficulties do exist with more generous enemy AI and time limits however.
 * Religious Bruiser: Tommy is shown to be making the sign of the cross a few times especially during tense moments.
 * Shoot the Dog:
 * Averted in the remake in a literal way, as only dead dogs could be found likely due to animal cruelty concerns.
 * As in the original, this is a core plot point throughout the game, where Tommy is faced with difficult choices but is actually mortified by it. Tommy was forced to
 * Super Drowning Skills: Though being based on the Mafia III engine, Tommy can still swim but the main map prevents him from doing so; loading up the debug or leftover maps allows you to use what was supposedly a Dummied Out feature.
 * Took a Level in Badass: Sarah is shown to be far less vulnerable as she was able to kick the groin off one of those who tried to hit her.