Watch the full video interview above, or download the 720p version right here
AusGamers: Welcome back to AusGamers you're here with myself, Stephen Farrelly, sitting in warehouse somewhere in San Francisco with Jack Scalici from 2K Games who worked very closely with 2K Czech on Mafia II.

Jack, the game is looking pretty damn good and I've had the privelege of checking the game out on PC and just now am spending some time with the PS3 version, I guess one of the first questions I have is about platform parity; obviously the PC version looks a lot better than the console versions but with 2K Czech's PC-focused history, was it difficult for them working across consoles as well?

Jack Scalici: It was definitely challenging. It's no secret the game has been delayed a couple of times and that's been predominantly because of the tech. Right from the very start we said, one of the things we didn't like about the first Mafia was the PC version was so incredible and then the console versions were so lacklustre, we said for this game it's gonna be all three, a simultaneous ship and it's going to be the same experience across all platforms; they're all gonna look good, they're all gonna run good. And we've achieved that, that's what's taken so long, you know, they [2K Czech] wrote their own tech and adapted it to the three different platforms and as you've seen today, there's no difference other than the PC version having higher-resolution graphics if you have a card that will support it, and it'll have te enhanced GPU PhysX.

AG: Sony pushed their 3D angle at E3 pretty heavily this year - do you guys have anything in that regard planned for the PS3 version or anything like that?

Jack: Maybe down the track, yeah. It's something we'll look at down the road a little bit, I'm not sure right now what the plans are though, but I should mention additionally that the PC version supports nVIDIA 3D Vision Surround which is a little bonus for the PC gamers.



AG: Switch to gameplay, it seems like it will be easy for anyone who perhaps didn't play the first Mafia to draw parallels to the obvious like GTA et al, but Mafia II is a very different game. From the outset you're almost forced to live within this game-world in a correct way; you have to drive safely or you're immediately going to be accosted by the police and ultimately you're rewarded for playing by these types of rules - how conscious was it in development to realise that?

Jack: Well it's something that really sets us apart - you are a wiseguy in our game, you're not some thug who can do whatever the hell he wants; you're not gonna go deliver pizza, you're not gonna go drive taxis, because that's not what wiseguys do. You're going to behave a certain way and in that world, if you don't behave a certain way you won't last very long, you'll be killed.

So you have to become this character for the story, or it just doesn't work. That's one of the reasons we looked at the side-missions from outset and questioned which ones didn't belong and which of these would Vito never, ever do. So we took those out and the rest were the sort of thing wiseguys would do and it's something that fits with the character's motivations, you know, to make money for his family - not the mafia family, he doesn't give a s*** about them - he cares about his mother and his sister; he's trying to save them and provide for them. So those missions are the ones we said yes to and they became part of the main story.

AG: How difficult was it crafting a story where the player feels connected to the character because of his plight, because of his family? I mean, at the same time he's still doing all this doity woik, and so many games have tried to do that, like, a character such as Niko (GTA IV) just ended up being a mass murderer throughout the whole of that game - How hard is it to scale that back in this type of game and make people feel that when they were doing that they were still doing the right thing?

Jack: Well Vito has noble motivations. He's a good man in a bad-guy's world. He has nothing but the best intentions at first and then he kind of makes the decision that all of us would make - if you needed to make money quick and you're provided a way to do so, and once you've settled your debt you're given a choice, like red pill, blue pill; do you wanna stay where you are and be happy, or go over here and work at McDonald's, you know, and make no money and be nobody again. So of course, what would every single person do? They're gonna stay where they're making the money, where they're having fun and living a life where they could never have made it any other way.



AG: Have you introduced any kind of moral aspect to gameplay based on the character's noble intentions at the beginning of the game that have any kind of dynamic outcome on how it all ends?

Jack: No. We had that initially in the design where there were a couple key moral choices you had to make that would affect how the end of the game turned out, but when we tested it we found we had one ending, you know, we had four endings and we realised one of those was awesome and it really was the one we wanted and if we do a sequel it was what we wanted to have happened in this game and it was probably the most satisfying, the most intriguing; it'll invoke the most emotional response from the player.

So we decided we wanted everyone to experience that ending and the moral choices felt a little bit forced honestly - it just didn't fit with the wiseguy thing as well as it should have, put it that way. And since we wanted to drive the player towards that one ending anyway, we just removed them and now it's a far more linear experience.

AG: In saying that, having such a linear experience - and so far I've only been driven (no pun intended) through a few levels - what's the point of having an open-world?

Jack: Well we really couldn't have achieved Mafia II without the city. Empire Bay is its own character, it's basically our supporting character and that's the way we've always treated it. You can't experience the difference between the 40s and the 50s and are apart of a world unless you're moving through that world. Everything you've played so far - imagine we just teleported you via a load screen to each level or mission. You wouldn't know what era is was, you couldn't experience the music, you couldn't see the pedestrians going about their business, you couldn't see the cars, you know what I mean? So for me, it's an action game that takes place in this amazing world and like I said, you're not gonna go and deliver pizza and we're not gonna have you go and save a little old lady's cat from a tree half way across the city - you have to behave as a wiseguy would and you have this amazing living, breating city in between all the action sequences.

AG: How much interaction do you actually have beyond what you're given and the point A to point B direction? Obviously it is an open-world, I'm sure you can drive to anywhere you want and start fights with anyone you want, but what are the ramifications, or rewards if any, for doing that - for straying off the main course?



Jack: You can do whatever you want in between required objectives. So the story doesn't progress until you get to a certain point, and sometimes it's timed (most often it's not though), so you can go basically wherever the hell you want in the game-world and do whatever you want at any time, and then once you're done driving around or doing whatever it is you're doing (and provided you've successfully lost the cops), you can continue on with the story.

AG: In that this is a living, breathing world, you guys seem to have really done your homework - little things like driving the cars, you know, you mentioned in your opening before that they're very boxie and heavy and very representative of the 40s and 50s - I got some air off a hill before once I turned off the assisted driving and it felt like I bottomed out when I landed because of the weight. How much research went into all of that and how deep are those physics...

Jack: The 2K Czech guys got really, really geeky with the cars and physics. The guys who handled the driving portion of the game, as far as they were concerned they were making a driving/racing game; we told them to just make those cars feel amazing and they really succeeded. The cars look amazing, they all feel differently and once you get into the 50s you get the incredible convertables, sports cars, and every car feels unique, and that was the main goal - not just to have a sedan and a sports car - every engine sounds different... they just got real geeky.

You know, over there (2K Czech) they have actual racing wheels and that sort of thing. So when you play the game, the driving portions feel like a driving game, and the shooting portions feel like a shooter and it's all happening in this crazy, detailed open city and you're just playing through this epic mafia story and that was the goal all these different gameplay settings come together with a single narrative that drives you forward.

AG: In terms of narrative length, there seems to be a lot of cut-scenes, a lot of dialogue, a lot of ambient story to tell... what would be the average amount of time for someone to play through the whole thing?

Jack: I don't even know. Everyone is so different... we have over two hours of cut-scenes in the game now, but I really couldn't say. I spend half my time just driving around listening to music.



AG: In terms of voice talent, have you guys revealed the cast? Any famous names in there?

Jack: There's really no one famous and that was an active decision on my part that the team absolutely bought into. You really can't get this kind of stuff from a famous person - they don't want to come in more than once, you have to deal with their agent and their lawyer and their manager and it's a ton of money, which is just a hassle because even if you deal with that and pull it off, and I've dealt with some big names before and they've been wonderful to work with, but I've also dealt with people who've been a nightmare to work with, and so because of the size and scope of this we didn't want any one person overshadowing the story. And so if we got some of our favourite actors from mob movies, as soon as that guy opens his mouth all you're going to be thinking is "oh my God, that's what's his name from so and so" and you're thinking about the actor and not the character.

So my goal with the casting was to get actors who haven't been in too many games and really a lot of these guys have been in no games before; they have theatre experience and television experience and film experience, so they're competent actors but they'd never even thought about doing a videogame until their agent gave them the script and asked if they were interested, and they were, like, "f*** yeah I'm interested", and so I think we achieved securing really good, competent actors who aren't going to overshadow the characters they play.

AG: In talking about the scripting - the era the game is set; there's a lot of reference thrown about to a time long gone, but quite judgmental and the game is pretty full-on in its representation of this with characters casting stereotypical dispersions, and racist remarks... how precarious was it handling that fine line?

Jack: Well that's it, and I know people like this. I grew up in New York which is the world's biggest melting pot, you know, it's filled with people who left their own country on a steam ship to travel half way across the world and wind up lumped in and living on top of one another, all fighting for the same jobs and so your friends are your own ethnic group and if you're talking about really exclusive boy's clubs where only one ethnic group is allowed in, it's the mafia. And the mafia don't even like themselves and they don't like any other ethnic groups and so they all have certain words for each other it's not something we shied away from. If I wasn't employed by Take-Two, I guarantee that none of this would be in the game. They're the only one with the balls to say yes, this is not gratuitous, this is how people talked back then, that's how they're going to talk in our game.

And so I ran everything by our legal team, by my boss and they all agreed it was legit and it's how you would hear characters speaking in a movie set in the same time period - we didn't put it in just to put it in, you know, these are real guys and that's how they speak.



AG: In terms of "real guys", did you actually have anyone on board who knows that life helping in the way of dialogue or story or even just some of the crazy mafioso adventures?

Jack: That was my area of expertise. A lot of the actors, though, really didn't need to do a lot of research for their characters and that's all I have to say on that. They walked in and it was like, ah yeah... I'm gonna need you to take off that 10 pounds of gold and yeah (smiles). A lot of these guys grew up in that area and if you were to cast a mob movie you would cast these voice-actors, they're not just overweight guys from the mid-west these are legit guys from Brooklyn, Queens, Manhatten... and you can't pull off this dialogue unless you've lived in those areas.

AG: Okay that's fine, thanks so much for that Jack.