Me and the other Mafia sickos are jonesing to drive so unbelievably slowly in The Old Country. We’re cackling with glee at the prospect of taking the reins of a horseless carriage in 1900s Sicily - a time when cars were an obscene, rickety toy for those with more money than sense. We’re rubbing our hands together at the idea of taking the corners like a bowling ball while the police catch up on foot. We’re itching to get our hands on the Fiat 6 HP, a racecar that looks like an overgrown pram.
Why? Because this slightly perverse, backwards idiosyncrasy is baked into Mafia’s DNA. You could argue that the series becomes more itself the further back in time it’s set. The first entry - an urban open world game released at the height of GTA fever in 2002 and faithfully remade a few years ago for the Definitive Edition - kicked off in the Prohibition era.
