Mafia II

A: How open will Empire Bay be? Are there lots of side-missions and hidden content for players to explore?

2K: Empire Bay is pretty huge; the playable area is around 10 square miles. The focus of Mafia II is very much on the cinematic shootouts and car chases but the city backdrop is still a fun and interesting place to be. There are 20 city districts, each with their own vibe and style of architecture, enemy gangsters roaming the streets, many beautifully rendered shops, diners and bars, over 50 vehicles that the player can "acquire" and personalise and, of course, the police are always present to react to your misdeeds.

A: With a character name like Vito, your inspiration is pretty obvious - but what other films have you looked at for inspiration? How about books, or real historical figures?

2K: There's a very wide range of inspirational works for the game: crime movies, period music, pulp novels, even 1940s wedding catalogs! Our goal has always been to deliver an experience where the players feel like they are playing through an epic mob movie. The story spans a decade, features over 300 speaking characters and is scored by the Prague Philharmonic so, I think you get the idea that the story and presentation here is going to blow you away. Obviously The Godfather is the mob-movie figurehead, but actually that film is quite different in its direction, at least from the story we are trying to tell. We didn't want to go down the route of portraying mafioso as honorable criminals in tuxedos. We are far more interested in the wise guys not the dons. Our story is about the soldiers rather than the bosses, so we are much closer in tone to Goodfellas in this respect, I think.

A: Gangster stories like this are often very moral tales, and often strive to show that crime in fact doesn't pay - are you taking a similar story-telling tack?

2K: They are very moral tales and I think that's why we like them. There is, clearly, this fantasy element of being a complete and utter bad ass but underneath it all the actual people and stories are quite human. Sopranos is a great example of this; the show was as much about the Mafia as it was about Tony Soprano's family trials.

Anyway, a little off track there...we deal with glamorisation of crime for sure and we deal with this in two ways: first, our fictional story is actually a tragedy. Yes, our story charts Vito's rise in a life of organized crime but things start to come unstuck for him; things aren't all they're cracked up to be.

In gameplay terms, the way we deal with it is to have a pretty tough police system; if you commit a crime in our city then, much like in real life, the police will come after you - and harshly too! You cannot just rampage through Empire Bay and get away with it.

A: Finally, the question that has to be asked - what's your favourite gangster movie? And why?

2K: Tough question, but it has to be Goodfellas; so many great performances and the direction and writing was a once in a life time deal, which doesn't happen very often. The real reason we love it is for the story, of course. Mafia is a romantic imagining of the The Godfather story and it was good, don't get us wrong, but we find Goodfellas more believable, more human. An honorable mention has to go to Sopranos as well. To us, it's quite simply the best TV show ever made.

DH: Thanks for your time.