How did you come up with the characters for the game?
Those were actually mostly created by the original writer, Daniel Vavra. He's a very talented man. He was the original writer of Mafia I, and he wrote and designed everything about Mafia II - the early version. What we're shipping now is quite different than what he had in mind back then. I think almost all the characters have survived.
At 2K we really put everything through the ringer, especially story. This is a story-driven game, and it will suck if your story A) isn't good, and B) isn't told well. I think almost everything he had in there held up, and the characters right from the get-go when Daniel and I collaborated on the script. He said, "Here's what I had in mind." I worked with him and said, "Ok, let's tweak this guy a little bit here, do it this way, this is the way he speaks indicating he's not very intelligent." Little things like that. I do this with all of our developers. We work with characterization, and everything we need to cast a great actor to really bring a character alive.
Do you have a favorite?
Joe. Joe is the most fun. We said, "None of these guys are going to be stereotypes." But, you need one guy who is the stereotype. Not saying that Joe is the stereotype. He's interesting in his own way, but if there's going to be the big, loud-mouthed, goombah who causes trouble all the time, that was Joe.
When I met the actor who plays him, Bobby Costanzo, I was like, "Oh my god, you're Joe. You are the guy!" I handed him the script and he was like, "[Italian accent] This is good dialogue!" Thank you, thank you for proving to me that I'm not crazy and I could find someone who could play this character! There was no one else who could do it, it was incredible.
How do you balance Vito's moral standing with his involvement in the crime family?
I think of him as a good guy in a bad world. Nowhere in the game do you hear the words, "money, power, respect, family, honor." That's all the stereotype crap you hear when you think about the mafia. We threw that out; ripped it out of the story. It doesn't appear anywhere. I think “respect” happened once, but no one says “honor” ever. When Vito says “family,” he's talking about his mom or sister. It's something you can identify; that you need to protect your loved ones. Everyone has a family, or almost everyone has a family or people they care about.
That was Vito's motivation early on in the story that you see and play in the Home Sweet Home mission. Yes, your father is a dead beat and he left you with this debt and now you're the man of the house. It's the 1940s. Momma and Francesca aren't going to go out and get high-paying office jobs. Women were expected to stay home, raise babies and make babies back then. No one was going to pay them anything. They were screwed without him, so you have to do this.
If I gave you a job and you get paid a million dollars a year, and then all of a sudden you paid off your debt and then I said to you, "Ok, you have to go back to being a video game journalist. Yes or no?" What are you going to say? It's the choice everyone would make. Do you live the life that every young man wants to live, and keep doing what you're doing even though you might die one day? Or are you going to go work at McDonald's? What would you do in that situation? That's what he does, and he tries to get out in some way.
Empire Bay takes inspiration from NYC, San Francisco, Chicago, etc. What pieces of these cities were you trying to replicate?
It's based on NYC from back in the day, during the 1950s. Most of it is New York, but the artist took a lot of inspiration from Chicago and a little bit of San Francisco. There are no hills in NYC; you can't jump or anything. It's also not the most efficiently designed city. When you get into lower Manhattan, the streets start going everywhere. No city is the most efficiently designed city.
We want a city that we can create great gameplay around, especially great driving gameplay, and intuitive driving. If you replicate NYC people are going to say, "Oh! Look at the map here! You deviated from this!" Yes, because that sucks. I don't want to drive that way, I want to drive this way! So that's why we based it on NYC. You can see the Brooklyn Bridge, the Chrysler building; you see these iconic landmarks. We didn't go super geeky and get down to make it NYC.
We'd like to thank Jack Scalici for taking the time to discuss Mafia II's development with us.
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