Game 236: Mafia (1986)

   

Mafia

Germany

Igelsoft (developer and publisher)

Released in 1986 for Commodore 64; English translation 2010 by TheRyk

Date Started: 11 December 2016
Date Ended: 11 December 2016

Total Hours: 4

Difficulty: Easy  (2/5)

Final Rating: 30

Ranking at Time of Posting: 137/238 (58%)

Ranking at Game #460: 290/460 (63%)

I'm not sure I've ever heard the right term to describe what Mafia is. It shares a common structure with Sid Meier's Pirates!, AutoDuel, Visions of the Aftermath, and even that awful Girlfriend Construction Set, although all five games are given different genres on MobyGames. In each of them, you have an underlying score and a fixed time period in which to engage in a number of scenarios to try to boost that score. The games don't last that long (Mafia doesn't even have a save capability) and are meant to be replayed. No epic quest here--just a fun little afternoon diversion.

Mafia is light on the RPG elements, but it has them. A new player specifies a name and gang name and then rolls for random values (15-50) in intelligence, skill, and brutality; these statistics in turn affect success in missions and in combat. You specify how long the game will last by giving the ending year, and then you are set loose on the city of Chicago in 1925, with no reputation and $6,000 or $7,000 in your pocket.

    

This was a lucky series of rolls.

   

The map of Chicago--which has nothing to do with Chicago--is unvarying from game to game. It is dotted with shops, banks, pubs, casinos, loan sharks, and other buildings, and the player's goal is to navigate through them and accomplish things, thereby increasing his score and rank. When the time limit is up, the winner is the player with the highest score. In a single-player game, the player must achieve a maximum score (100) plus accomplish two key side-missions.

    

The game world with its various facilities.  The best I can figure, up is west. In the lower-left, you're seeing a few of the docks and the beginning of Navy Pier. Michigan Avenue cuts down the middle, and you're seeing a bit of Grant Park in the upper-left. Don't ask me to figure out the train stations, though.

    

Every location gives you the opportunity to do something positive to increase your score. When you enter each location for the first time, you get a poorly-drawn full-screen graphic and are then taken to a set of menu commands. Your specific actions differ on the type of location but include:

• Gambling Dens: Bet money on poker, blackjack, or roulette. Alas, you cannot actually play these games; the game simply tells you if you've won or lost. You can't even see what the probabilities are. From experimentation, they seem to be about 50/50 for all games.

    

The graphic upon entering the gambling den for the first time.

   

• Banks: Rob it or case it for a nighttime safecracking. You have to have the rank of at least "small fry" to do either, and you have to have at least one other gang member to commit a robbery. The safecracking option brings up a fun mini-game in which you scroll through a three-digit combination on a safe and actually listen for "pings" with different tones than the others.

    

The cool safecracking minigame--one of the few times in RPG history that sound is vital to the game.

   

• Grocery store: Rob it, panhandle, demand protection money, or pretend to be a police officer and confiscate the register. Only works at higher ranks. If robbery or extortion is successful, you have sub-options whether to ransack the place and/or rough up the shopkeeper.

   

I never had option #2 work.

    

• Subways: Pick pockets or snatch bags. This is an easy way to get money and points in the early game.

• Hideout: Rent a flat for a certain number of months, or pay to renew. Hideouts are necessary to develop gangs.

• Gun store: Buy weapons or get training. Weapons include melee weapons (knives, chains), revolvers, shotguns, machine guns, and grenades. You have to have a minimum intelligence or "brutality" to use some weapons. Ammunition is limitless.

• Car dealer: Buy or steal a car.

  

Only one of these cars was available in 1925.

   

• Police headquarters: Turn yourself in, bribe the police commissioner to look the other way for a fixed number of months, or try to break a gang member out of prison.

• Railroad station: Go to the bar (see "pub" below), pickpocket passengers, or rob the mail train.

• "Faking Billy": Buy counterfeit currency or a fake ID.

    

You would of course expect a counterfeiter to operate with a paint can and roller.

    

• Pub: Get a legitimate job (bouncer, croupier, hotel clerk) for a few months, get intelligence about available special jobs, buy alcohol for bootlegging, hire guys for your gang. Working a real job usually leads to either some skill checks and/or combat with single troublemakers.

The different options in the bar.

   

You accomplish these things in the context of turns, or months, which pass pretty rapidly. It can take an entire month to walk down the street and visit the pub, for instance. Buying or stealing a car increases your mobility and thus what you can accomplish in a month.

Every success except gambling adds to your point total, which causes your rank to climb from "rookie" (0) all the way to "gangland king" (100), passing through ranks like "snatcher," "hoodlum," "mafioso," and "public menace" along the way. Certain actions are restricted by rank; only "small fries" and above can rob banks, for instance, and only "hoodlums" and above can recruit other gang members.

    

An overview of my progress at the turn of the month.

    

Just about any scenario can go wrong and lead to combat with other gangs, police, bank security guards, and so forth. To succeed in the scenario, you have to win such combats. The combat system isn't bad--a lot of RPGs of the era are worse--but it could have been better with some effort. Basically, you and your fellow gang members (if you have any) exchange shots or blows with members of the opposing force until one of the groups is wiped out. ("Energy" serves as a proxy for hit points.) Your attributes and weapon type play a role, and there are some minor considerations related to terrain on some maps, but a lot of it is just luck.

    

Fighting against guards to rob the mail train. I guess those are giant bags of mail.

    

Losing in combat doesn't mean "dying." You can't actually die in the game. The worst that happens is you get caught and go to jail for a few months, which reduces your score. But if you set the scenario for long enough and play smart, you have plenty of time to make up for losses. 

In between months, you get a summary of your statistics and finances along with a continually-updated "wanted" poster for your character. The higher your level the greater likelihood that you'll get stopped by a police roadblock. 

   

   

Winning in single player means accomplishing three goals. First, you have to get your score to 100. This is the easiest part. You can do it via some of the scenarios that are almost impossible to lose at, such as working bouncer and croupier jobs at bars, or safecracking banks. The second is to complete the "assassinate the mayor" mission. You get this from bartenders after asking for their intel on available jobs.

   

Working a "real" job with a skill check. If I failed it, I would have had to fight one-on-one with an unhappy customer.

   

Once this mission is assigned, a new icon appears on the screen until you decide to attack. You first have to defeat the mayor's 6 bodyguards, then fight a rather sad battle against the lone mayor himself.

I don't like his chances.

   

(I'm obliged to note here that the Mayor of Chicago in 1930, when I killed him, was William Hale Thompson, widely regarded as one of the most corrupt mayors in American history, even by Chicago standards. He had the open support of Al Capone. The St. Valentine's Day Massacre happened during his third term. If I had solved this quest before 1927, I would have killed William Emmett Dever, the mayor who interrupted Thompson's second and third terms. He was known as "Decent Dever" for enforcing Prohibition even though he didn't agree with it. He's thus a much likelier candidate for this mission, and since he was due to die in 1929 from cancer anyway, it wouldn't have messed up the timeline very much.)

   

   

The second special mission is to ambush and rob a cash transport. It's the hardest mission in the game, involving combat against 10 police officers with machine guns.

    

The epic final battle on the streets of Chicago.

    

Solving these latter two missions means, therefore, building up your own gang. I needed 10 heavily-armed members to accomplish the last mission. You find gang members in bars. Each of them costs several thousand dollars (and you have to have a "flat" rented before you can hire any of them), plus another several thousand to equip them with weapons. If you don't like their statistics, you can pay several thousand to train them (an option also available for your own character). This is often necessary since the types of weapons a character can use are limited by attributes.

   

My late-game "party." The game names your companions.

    

Getting (and keeping) all this money makes up the bulk of the game. Robbery jobs might net you a few thousand--more if you can get some intelligence on where gold bars are stored. Investing in a credit business provides monthly payoffs. Investing in weapons smuggling (done in bars) can provide major one-time payoffs. Safecracking is pretty lucrative. Bank robbery almost always ends in combat, but the net is usually worth it. Even working bouncer jobs for $2,000-4,000 adds up fast. Gambling is risky, but unscrupulous players in the era of save states will naturally find it the easiest option.

   

And someone else took the risk!

   

Of course, events can cause you to lose money, too. If you're caught by the police (which often happens at frequent roadblocks), you either have to bribe them (around $5k) or hire a lawyer (about the same) to try to beat the rap. You can prevent this with a fake ID, but that's a few thousand in itself. You also need to maintain a hideout.

    

   

Still, the assets generally overwhelm the liabilities. I was able to win without cheating (i.e., reloading when something happened I didn't like) in just a few hours. When you accomplish all three goals, you're treated to an image of presumably you as a mafia don plus some congratulatory text.

     

   

In a GIMLET, the game gets:

• 3 points for the game world. It's original for an RPG, but Jazz Age Chicago doesn't really "come alive" in Mafia.

• 2 points for character creation and development. It just barely meets RPG criteria here.

    

"Interviewing" a goon for my party.

    

• 2 points for NPC interaction. They're not classic "NPCs" that we see in most games, but I'll give some credit to the bartenders and shopkeepers and whatnot.

• 3 points for encounters and foes. There's nothing to the foes, but I rather like the scenario-based encounters, which even offer a bit of role-playing (e.g., you can play as a card shark, bootlegger, gun-runner, extortionist, robber, or some combination of these).

    

A successful robbery against a store clerk affords some role-playing options.

    

• 3 points for combat that aspires to be tactical but doesn't quite make it.

• 1 point for equipment. You just have different kinds of weapons.

• 6 points for the economy, the true driving force of the game.

    

....as a successful mail train robbery drives home.

    

• 3 points for a main quest with several parts and paths to reach it.

    

Getting intelligence on one of the final missions.

   

• 3 points for graphic, sounds, and inputs. The graphics are ugly. The sound is fun in parts (I like the machine guns and the safecracking). The interface is simple and easy to master. Loading the graphics takes too long.

  

The police chief doesn't really want to see me.

   

• 4 points for replayable gameplay, and it's hard to challenge the pacing when you can set it yourself.

The final score of 30 is higher than I expected, but despite the comparatively high score, I couldn't help but wish it was better. Better character development, better combat, maybe some more complex plot developments, a more interesting map...all of these would have helped make Mafia a true crime RPG instead of a crime-themed simulation/strategy game with RPG elements.

The one thing I didn't experience was multi-player mode, and I could see it being a lot of fun (if even less of an RPG). You'd have to specify a relatively short time period or else the game (which, again, you can't save) would take all night and everyone would find a way to get to 100. But with that caveat, Mafia could become a fast-paced board game in which you'd have a lot of fun laughing at other player's misfortunes and declaring gang wars on them.

I haven't been able to find much information on Igelsoft (I believe igel means "hedgehog") or anything at all on Mafia's developers specifically. I don't get the impression that it was terribly popular, even in Germany. (The English version that I played was a 2010 adaptation.) But it does deserved to be remembered as the first "crime RPG," if only barely (there have been other games in which crime was possible, but I can't think of an earlier one with crime as the driving mechanic). Quickly scanning my list, I don't see another obvious one until Gangsters 2 (2001).

It's nice when my diversions from Fate are just single-session games. Let's see if the same is true of The Rescue of Lorri in Lorrintron.

*****

I played Journey into Darkness for a while and found its interface excruciating. Then I realized I could reject it because there didn't seem to be any mechanism of character development except through acquiring inventory. No experience, no levels. If I'm wrong about that, someone will have to play the game long enough to prove me wrong, and that doesn't seem likely.

I've also rejected Mindstone on the same grounds. It's an adventure game in which the characters can gain some one-off increases in attributes. This is not enough "character development" to qualify as an RPG.

Finally, after some research, I've come to the conclusion that Planet's Edge is a 1992 game, not 1991. I base this on a) the earliest review of the game wasn't published until May 1992; most are from the fall of that year; b) the trademark for the game wasn't approved until June 1992; c) the November 1991 issue of a German gaming magazine refers to the game as "forthcoming"; and d) other than the reference in (c), the name doesn't appear in any book or periodical searches (relying heavily on Google Books here) before 1992.