8 of the Best Gangster Games Ever Made

This week’s Mafia III news dump—a new trailer, new previews, a release date (10/7/16)—has focused a lot of attention on the latest game in 2K’s gangland saga. The name’s the same, but it doesn’t seem to have a direct connection to either of those other two games. Instead of the Italian-American stereotypes we’ve played as in the past, this go-through focuses on a biracial Vietnam vet in an ersatz 1960s New Orleans who aims to take down the Italian mob that broke up his family’s criminal empire. It’s a setting and character type you don’t often see in games, much less ones about the mob.
Mafia III seems to take a different approach, narratively, from what we expect from this kind of game. Perhaps it’ll kick-start this recently overlooked genre—other than GTA V, which is less about dominating the criminal underworld than about how to operate outside of it, and the last few Saints Row games, which are basically just farcical parodies of the games industry as a whole at this point, there haven’t been many good games about gangsters. The new generation of consoles needs a good mobster game.
All the news about Mafia III has got us thinking about the gangster genre in videogames in general. Here are eight of the best gangster games ever made, in no specific order.
The Godfather
Combining events from the film and an original storyline, The Godfather was an unusually authentic movie based game. Stars such as James Caan and Robert Duvall were among the actors who provided character voices, and Marlon Brando even recorded a single new line of dialogue for the game shortly before dying. The story might have been a little odd, with Michael Corleone receding from the spotlight due to rights issues (Al Pacino saved his likeness for another movie on this list…), but the stylized recreation of mid-century New York was delightful, and the process of expanding your turf by taking over districts and slowly decimating your rival families was compulsive fun. The Godfather would be one of the best gangster games even without the license, and remains a highlight in the libraries of all the consoles it was released for. (It’s probably one of the 10 or 20 best Wii games not made by Nintendo.)
Scarface: The World Is Yours
Al Pacino was missing in The Godfather game because he decided to lend his likeness, but not his voice, to this one instead. Starting where the film left off, your job in Scarface: The World Is Yours was to rebuild Tony Montana’s empire, with coke deals being an important part of raising capital. The “Blind Rage” feature was the best part of the game, filling your “Balls Meter” by killing enemies and taunting victims allowing you to turn Tony, for a short period of time, into a immune, slow motion psychopath with automatic aim and a filthy mouth. It sounds absurd, but then wasn’t the movie, too?
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City