How realistic is EA’s latest gangster adventure, both as a movie tie-in and a depiction of mafia business? Keith Stuart talked to three guys who really ought to know…

As far back as I can remember, gamers have always wanted to be gangsters. From the old text adventure King of Chicago on the Commodore 64 to the Mafia series and of course, Grand Theft Auto, there have always been games based around organized crime. But three years ago, EA scored the ultimate license: The Godfather. The result was an open-world third-person shooter cleverly tying in with key elements from Coppola’s legendary movie.

For the sequel, the team at Redwood Shores grabbed the Dead Space engine, took the best bits from the first game, and then sat and watched Godfather II something like 30 times. They realised one thing they weren’t capturing was the strategic element, the decision-making, the life of the head guy. Hence Godfather 2’s Don’s View, an overhead representation of the game area, showing all the rackets and crime rings, and all your rival families, ripe for destruction. Like a sort of gangland version of Monopoly, your aim is to dominate the board, taking over every racket, either going in yourself, or sending family members.

Godfather II, then, is part action shooter, part RTS, following the events of the movie but also bringing in other historic elements, and of course a new lead character – Dominic – a trusted servant of the Corleone family, running things while Michael is being investigated by a US Senate committee. Through Dominic, you must build a family of street soldiers, each member boasting his own upgradeable special abilities, like arson and demolition. You can also do favours for powerful union bosses, take paid-for hits, and generally cause chaos on the streets of sixties America.

To reveal more about the game, and its depiction of Mafia business, EA took a handful of journalists out to New York last week to meet Executive Producer Hunter Smith, plus Ex-NYPD detective Bo Dietl and Godfather star Gianni Russo, who famously got his role in the movie through a deal worked out between Paramount and mafia don Joe Colombo. Here’s what they had to say…

So Godfather 2 is more about being the don than just a lowly wise guy…
HS: “As we were watching the films, we knew we wanted to make an open world action game. But you’ve got a three hour film and ten minutes of action – the rest of the time there’s people sitting around a table talking, scratching their chins and strategizing - our goal was to give you that experience, too; to get you thinking about how the family is going to be successful. And as you’re doing that, you intersect back and forth with the Godfather II storyline. So you’re there figuring out how to get senator Pat Geary into that bed, you’re there when Frankie Pentangeli gets that rope around his neck. You’re the one who gets his brother Vincenzo into court in the senate hearing…

And the way the city is carved up like this, divided into different types of rackets – does that accurately represent organised crime in New York in the sixties?
BD: “Believe me, every aspect - the restaurants, prostitution, extortion, drugs, guns – it’s how organised crime works. It’s all about earning money. The bigger your crew, the greater your killing power, the more you earn. It’s kind of exciting to watch how you take over the other families’ businesses in the game, because that’s exactly what it’s all about.

GR: I think it’s interesting they have five families! That’s been the structure since the thirties. It’s very authentic. Fortunately we don’t know any of those people…

BD: It’s educational really, it shows you how the mob gains power. The first thing you do is take another family’s capacity to earn money, because when you take their money away, you take their power, they can’t hire as many guys off the street, they can’t get the best guns…

In terms of the movie, how close is your narrative to the story that Coppola shows?
HS: It was important to be true to the film, people liked that about the first game. It was also important that it was comprehensible, so we changed the order of some things, we focused on one time period. We said, okay what are the key moments and which ones are relevant to the arc of the game action? Bringing Pentangeli in and the Rissoto brothers, that was an important way to teach you the beginning aspects of the game because you had to clear up a problem for Michael.

But we also extended the story and went outside of the movie’s bounds, to cover Cuba, the CIA, the mob, their relationships and what was going on there. It was all covered in James Ellroy’s wonderful book, American Tabloid. We don’t have 500 pages to tell the story though, so we tried to borrow iconic moments from the culture, to help weave a tale that makes sense to you as a player.

Come back tomorrow for more