Mafia: The Old Country’s creators couldn’t avoid politics in telling an authentic mob tale

That story was one that the brains behind 2K Games’ Mafia series had been dying to tell for a while. Developer Hangar 13 (and the former 2K Czech team that was folded into it in 2017) had told plenty of tales about gangsters roaming around fictional American cities in the first three Mafia games, but the trilogy didn’t do much to root all the bloodshed in real Italian history. That changed earlier this year with Mafia: The Old Country. The action-adventure game left the United States for Sicily in order to create an origin story of sorts — not one for any of its characters, but for the concept of Italian organized crime itself.