For whatever reason, these games never found a strong audience when they were released. Like movies before them, video games that stray from mainstream conventions often get left behind only to be discovered and accepted by those looking for something a little more irregular. Unlike movies, games don’t have the luxury of a shelf life and if not discovered soon enough, evaporate from cultural consciousness completely. Cult Game Worship explores games that few loved, but loved lots.

Among other things, open world games have the distinct challenge of finding the right balance between realistic and fun. Most people would agree that a sandbox game so realistic that vehicles run out of fuel, randomly lose a tire, or run out of juice tip the balance out of fun’s favour. Yet, many people also decry the logic defying insanity of the Saint’s Row franchise so it’s tough to really know what people expect coupled with what people like. A proper open-world game needs strict rules of logic with a tinge of luck for variety, but no one wants to lose a mission because of fate either.

Grand Theft Auto III is often seen as the bar for how a sandbox game should operate logically. GTAIII was released in 2001, a strange time where sandbox games were a new and exciting progression in technology and gameplay rather than the default go-to. The Playstation 2 could render Liberty City in three massive chunks that loosely dictated your direction with an emphasis on exploration. Cars came in all shapes, sizes, and speeds; the police were relentlessly tough antagonists that could be permanently stopped with a quick paint-job; every street had distinct character and unique, memorable landmarks. The game laid out the commandments of the sandbox genre: basic law of the real world applies, but only the basics. You were never penalized for reckless driving and killing one police officer was just a slap on the wrist. Secondly, the world must be as rich and culturally diverse as anything in reality including slums to high-rises and pimps to yuppies.

One year later, in October 2002, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City was released which further expanded the general backbone of the Grand Theft Auto aesthetic with a greater emphasis on the narrative structure of seedy crime culture. Vice City‘s innovations sent other developers ready to ride Rockstar’s wave of success back to the drawing boards. One game, however, did manage to squeeze out the door just before Vice City in August 2002: Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven.

If Grand Theft Auto III was The Sopranos of video games starring low-class strip club owners hiring you for whackings, and Vice City was to be Scarface romanticizing the 80’s and confronting topics of politics and immigration, then Mafia was by contrast, intending to be The Godfather. Set in the 1930’s in a fictional Boston-esque city of Lost Heaven, you play as Tommy Angelino, a nobody cab driver trying to make a decent buck when you inadvertently become involved in a high speed pursuit which lands you in positive standing with the local, feuding Salieri mafia. Quickly, Tommy loses his job and becomes more embroiled with the Mafia despite his ernest efforts to remain peacefully away. The game hits all of the notes you’d associate with a mob story elegantly, if predictably, such as excess, heritage, culture, the American Dream, and betrayal — all set up from the game’s opening where Tommy meets with a detective ready to initiate some sort of “trade” that clearly nods towards inner turmoil in the family ready to be slowly unraveled by the game’s narrative.

Authentic to its era with idealized infrastructure, historically specific vehicles, and scratchy jazz and blues radio tunes, Mafia was only a modest success in contrast to the more brutal, fast-paced Grand Theft Auto games that practically invented and still dominate the market. The reason for the public’s indifference towards Mafia despite its high production values and capitalizing on the GTA formula early on is somewhat of a mystery, however Mafia did not follow nearly any of the ground rules defined by the Grand Theft Auto franchise, instead determined to carve it’s own path in the then-fertile world of sandbox games.

Mafia is earnestly true to its time period, laying the cultural exploration of the era on thick. Set in the late days of prohibition and early days of the Great Depression, the game begins with Tommy struggling to make ends meet despite his optimistic recollection, “some other people were worse off than me”, which then sharply cuts to a vehicle being sprayed with bullets as it barrels down the streets. As the game progresses the mob contacts expand, but Tommy remains the emotional core of the story. Unusual for its time, Mafia is largely a focused character study of an American man not particularly interested in what The American Dream has to offer until he gets a taste of it from his new supportive mob buddies who bail him out of recent unemployment. The game’s most memorable sequences are typically its cutscenes which are professionally shot with the right sense of stylish pizazz such as appropriate slow-motion and a swelling operatic score that flairs up when necessary but always maintains the proper muted, thematic mood that is in part nostalgic for the era, and in part nostalgic for Tommy recollecting the whole story.

As Tommy moves through the ranks of the Mafia, he meets and eventually marries Sarah, an innocent woman on the outskirts of the Mafia connection. While the relationship is weakly developed, for a video game and for 2002, it is also an accomplishment. Grand Theft Auto III was rightly condemned for its use of women as either prostitutes or your insane, villainous ex-girlfriend whom you must destroy at all costs, but Mafia attempts to forge some sort of emotional arc to it’s expanding cast including a revealing-for-2002 video-game sex scene that isn’t perverse or immature but appropriate for the mature tone of the game.

Visually, not much changes in Lost Heaven during the decade-spanning arc of the story aside from new models of cars that phase their way into the world as the plot moves forward. The games visuals were striking for 2002, and despite the degradation of the textures by today’s standards, everything is quite pleasant looking. The game boldly employs a more realistic art direction than the cartoonish Grand Theft Auto titles which allows for more facial close-up shots in cut scenes emphasizing the facial detail of eye movements, hairlines, facial scruff, and wrinkles. The sometimes stiff animations and robotic jawlines aren’t all that convincing, nor were they upon release, but the artful approach is pulled off well enough to forgive the technical shortcomings.

Mafia‘s gameplay is at times it’s greatest asset, and at others it’s most troublesome fault. Unlike the Grand Theft Auto template, Mafia amps up its realism to sometimes painful degrees. The game is so realistic that in a hot pursuit, stealing an empty car is almost entirely out of the question. Abandoned cars require the lock to first be picked, then the car must be hot-wired, the car will then take a few moments to start up and be ready to move. You think you’re safe then but it requires a bit of acceleration to really gain momentum and reach top speeds. Mafia also employs a game-changing vehicle damage system where a car could be rendered immobile by shooting and flattening tires, drivers could be sniped through the windshield, and gas tanks could be shot for instant destruction. These innovations would go un-appreciated after Vice City capitalized on the innovation only months later. The unforgivingly realistic vehicle systems make the game infrequently frustrating and go as far as making gentle up-hill roads a difficult challenge for early-game vehicles. This concept goes in a radically opposite direction from the GTA mantra of fast cars; limited logic.

Additionally, Mafia became perhaps best known for it’s strict law system where minor infractions such as running a red light or speeding would draw nearby police attention. The penalty for these actions were merely inconvenient tickets issued by the officer who spotted you which does nothing other than slow you down. The game deliberately invented an irritating system that contradicts the most basic fun-versus-realistic rules of video games to influence a world of order and respect, the basis of the Mafia, rather than an all-out playground that the Grand Theft Auto titles became. In a strange pseudo-legal lession, you quickly learn that obeying the law when the police are within eye-sight is much easier and quicker than being rebellious and arrogant. Alternatively, true to the times, the police have limited communication with each other and taking out an officer in a relatively secluded area breeds less investigating officers than the radio-chatty, helicopter-ready police of modern day sandbox games which makes for grim shooting galleries of unfortunate victims that tail you outside the city limits.

The radically strict realism of the gameplay is certainly a contributing aspect to Mafia being under many people’s radar, but to those who appreciated what the game did, it’s a truly unique experience. There is no compromise of lazy modern gaming in Mafia, even reloading a weapon before the clip is empty will cause you to lose the unspent ammunition forever; this is truly a game for the dedicated and those who appreciate their experience unfiltered.

Once again, unlike Grand Theft Auto, which encouraged exploration through incentives of “hidden packages” or optional side-missions, Mafia is a strictly linear affair set in an open, complex world. This is a concept that is misunderstood by most people who played both this game and it’s sequel: why create a whole city if there is no reason to explore it? Other than to explore for the sake of exploring, there is no incentive to force you to the suburbs or the local deli. It is simply a delicately cast world created by a team of artists who are more interested in the architecture and culture of the 1930’s than the hidden collectables of gaming. The openness of each mission allows for variety when evading police or making a timed run to a destination, there are different avenues to take which heightens the illusion that you are part of a living, breathing city, not a character in some scripted play. The game isn’t about running the city or having clerks make offerings at their markets as you pass by — it’s about surviving in the city, and it would be pretty hard to convey that if the city was not there. You don’t have to explore Lost Heaven, but you can if you so choose.

Although finding a dedicated following, Mafia missed the mainstream explosion of Grand Theft Auto III because it took artistic risks opposed to latching to formula. It is rare for a game to take it’s time unveiling it’s characters, stories, and relationships, almost as rare as a game that chooses to delve into a fascinating turning point in American history so authentically. The rewarding experience of Mafia paved the way for similar (and similarly under-appreciated) gangster games such as The Godfather, but none of the imitators matched Mafia‘s sophistication. Appropriate to Mafia‘s own deliberate pacing, the game finally received a respectable sequel from the same developers eight years later called Mafia II that also stubbornly refused to abide by genre conventions.