In my small home, next to my television, there is a display cabinet or rather, a cupboard with glass doors. In that cupboard I put everything that is important to me. The upper shelf is a row of beautiful books about the occupation of the Dutch kingdom of Dr. Loe de Jong. In 25 books he explains the full war from the Dutch perspective. The bottom shelf are two synthesizers, once received from my brother. Discount people for him, but they look nice retro.
But it’s about the middle shelf. There is my collection of nerd things. Everything I have to do with Lord of the Rings. The Extended Editions of The Lord of the Rings on DVD and the same series with The Hobbit on Blu-ray. History of Middle Earth are three huge pills with all the information that I will never read. The six original Star Wars films in Blu-ray. The shelf is full. If I slide that aside, there is a totally meaningless box in the background that I just can’t get rid of.
It is a small square box, as you used to see so much of it in the Free Record Shop or Leest. However, it is not music. It is the three discs with which you can install Mafia on the PC. I still have a few other physical games, but I only kept them because of the beautiful boxes. Mafia doesn’t have a nice box, but I simply can’t say goodbye to it.
It makes no sense. I can’t even use it to install. I no longer have a DVD-ROM player in my computer and therefore I don’t know very well what to do with this physical copy. I can’t put it away because I simply don’t want it. I too am sometimes sensitive to nostalgia.
A game with a good and kind of realistic story
At that time, games were different. Games were mainly made for the action and sometimes it went together with a reasonable story. A good example is Half-Life, who had his story told by someone who said nothing, but always had interaction with the game world. The story was more than reasonable, but a typical story that you could encounter in games.
Metal Gear Solid had the opposite in terms of story. The gameplay was very good, the game was made very beautiful for that time and the story was more than reasonable. However, it had a huge Japanese blueprint, which you often saw at the time. You were overloaded with enormous trays of text that stamped a story from the ground that seemed like it was all written from the wrist. It seemed to be a bit like Donald Trump’s tax policy.
Before I make people angry, I still want to explain what I mean. In my opinion, Metal Gear Solid had a story where you were listening/reading for half of the game conversations between all kinds of characters and that story went from the heel on the branch. It was completely unpredictable, which many people see as plot twists, but it was simply not. For Plot Twists you need a solid foundation and it didn’t have that game. At one moment that person was an enemy, then again, then again, then again not, oh wait a minute, anyway. Then you had to beat him and then found out that he was indeed good, but he was not dead yet so you had to beat him again and so on. Games consisted quite often from stories like that.
And then there was Mafia. Mafia will not have been the first game to really tell a very consistent story, but he did this extremely well. Not alone. He did it without fantasy monsters or weird paranormal phenomena. I have to say that the main character was an insane cold -blooded murderer, but you have to have something to shoot in a game. The story further was not based on something that did not exist.
A virtual opera (with spoilers)
In the game you play as a Tommy Angelo, a taxi driver who is attacked during his service by one Pauli and Sam, who force him to flee the police. If this is successful, they see that Tommy is a bad motorist and therefore an excellent driver to get criminals away quickly. They therefore invite him to visit the Don Salieri food store.
At that time it is already clear. Tommy is stuck. No is not an option. In the first instance, he still kindly manages to repel the offer, but as soon as he gets into trouble because of the rival of the Salieris, he pushes this right into the arms of the Don. You immediately know that there is no way back. It’s like a tattoo. If you have it, then death is the only way to get rid of it.
To the large part of the story, Tommy delivers a lot of beautiful things. He has no shortage of Knaken and gets into the wedding boat with the daughter of the cook where Don Salieri always eats. With great pleasure he will be more and more firm in the web of the Mafia.
You notice this when you are expected to liquidate the accountant. With this man you have built up a friendship, but now you are expected to end that friendship very violently. Tommy has to get along, because he is already at the airport and his flight has no delay. Working in organized crime is simply no longer an option for him. Don Salieri sees this as a betrayal and he doesn’t like that.
What once turned out to be a dream wedding between Tommy and Don Salieri, it appears that a kind of sadomasochistic relationship, in which the protagonist is clearly the slave who is put in a cage until he has to dance for the master. It goes completely wrong when he and a friend commit a bank robbery without Don Salieri knowing about this, to keep some more money left over.
It is ready immediately. All the work you did for the Don has been forgotten. A poster is printed with the photo and the name of Tommy on it and an amount underneath. You are hunting and there is nothing else to do but to flee.
In Mafia 2 you can see how it ends with Tommy, when you drive about twenty years after the first part as the main character of that game to Tommy’s house and turn it into a sieve with a shotgun. The Mafia will always be there and you will never be able to escape.
The perfect gangster game with the perfect gangster story
After the first Mafia, in my opinion there was never really a game about organized crime that managed to tell the story in this way. Of course you have Grand Theft Auto and especially Grand Theft Auto IV has a very good and grim story, which is definitely worth playing, but in terms of story it doesn’t come close to Mafia.
More than twenty years after the original, Mafia: Definitive Edition was released. It should be a re -experience of a classic and he was received fairly positively. Yet he does not make it to the original at all. It seems as if they have hired the full story together, which created some inconsistencies here and there.
However, I have to admit that this is probably my own fault. It has been 25 years since I played Mafia and I don’t remember many details. It might not be all as good as I thought then. Then that game had an impact for me, but now it is no longer the only game that handles this well with telling his story.
Red Dead Redemption and his sequel are at least as good at the story and if you are talking about a perfect story, then the Uncharted series and The Last of Us are indispensable in the list. There are a lot more. But for me it all started with Mafia. The first game with really a good consistent and credible story.
