A new developer diary video has been released by Hangar 13 for the upcoming Mafia: The Old Country. The 5-minute video, which you can check out below, features various developers of who worked on the game from Hangar 13 and Italian studio Stormind Games talking about the upcoming title. Among the notable talking heads in the video are game director Alex Cox, lead writer Matthew Aitken, and art director Steve Noakes, among others.
Stormind Games’ senior project manager Salvo Fallica also chimes in about the title, saying “Our priority has always been to ensure that everything in the game feels authentic.” Authenticity is a key word in this developer diary, with even Cox and Aitken talking about the steps the developers had taken to make sure that things in Mafia: The Old Country feel exactly how they should.
“The details are absolutely key in keeping the immersion of the player,” said Aitken in the video, before being followed up by Cox talking about how much of the title is grounded in real-world history of the Sicilian Mafia. According to Cox, the studio got field experts to help it realise its vision for the game and provide context.
“We need to make sure that the game is grounded in the real history of the Sicilian Mafia,” said Cox. “Experts in their field are able to kind of help us contextualize things that we read in the stuff that we see on the screen with real lived experiences.”
Noakes also spoke about how much attention was paid to the details in some of the smallest aspects of Mafia: The Old Country. He brings up knives, which can be used in the game, and how much work the studio had to do to figure out what knives would look like in the time period in which Mafia: The Old Country takes place.
“When it comes to something like the knives in the game, there’s very little reference that’s available for that. Right?” said Noakes. “And so really we had to dig very deep. We went into some tiny little backwater of a machine shop where this guy and his son were still crafting knives by hand, imbuing them with their particular regional styles, known for their thumbprints, if you like, of their particular approach to building knives. We just wouldn’t really experienced that any other way.”
Associate art director Jakub Vavrik also spoke about how different Mafia: The Old Country will feel when compared to its predecessors, since the previous games in the franchise take place in dense cities. “The upcoming title, on the other ”Previous Mafia games were more or less city heavy, and now we are moving to more organic wildlife setting of Sicily,” he said.
Mafia: The Old Country was announced back in August 2024. The game, under development for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, is slated for release on August 8. The release date was announced with a trailer that also showcased some gameplay. In the meantime, if you’re planning on playing the title on PC, check out its hardware requirements.