The top 5 organized crime video games
With ‘Grand Theft Auto VI’ coming later this year, mobbed-up games are more popular than ever

In the 1980s, video arcades loaded with coin-operated gaming cabinets were a common shopping mall destination for people with quarters to burn. In 1986, alongside Pac Man, Donkey Kong and Galaga, appeared a new game: Empire City 1931. Like many games of the time, it had a simple concept: The player used a joystick to move a crosshair across the screen to find and take out gun-wielding mobsters in a version of New York City. These types of games did not garner much attention. It wasn’t until the early 2000s, when advances in technology allowed games to have a more cinematic feel, that the genre took off.
In 1997, Grand Theft Auto, which would become to crime-themed games what The Godfather was to Mob films, put players in the driver’s seat of a gang member working for the Mafia in fictional versions of New York City, Miami and Los Angeles. Early in development, the game started as a version of cops and robbers in a big-city playground, but it became apparent that the latter characters were more popular.
“Nobody wants to be the cop,” said Creative Director Gary Penn in an interview. “It’s more fun to be bad.”
The popularity of the GTA series grew as Rockstar Games released sequels. GTA’s success laid the framework for other game developers to follow with their own twists on this emerging genre, inspired by its action-oriented gameplay and engaging narrative. Today, there are more organized crime-themed games coming out each year than ever before.
The latest entries in the Mafia, GTA and Yakuza series, three of the biggest in the genre, are slated for release this year. Until then there are plenty of games out there for a virtual organized crime experience. Here are five of the top games in the genre that have paved the way for this year’s lineup.
5. Empire of Sin — Romero Games, 2020

Most games that feature organized crime craft fictional stories in made-up locations inspired by real life. Empire of Sin breaks this tradition by assembling its cast from real historical figures and through its setting of Prohibition-era Chicago. Brenda Romero, director of Empire of Sin, drew inspiration for the game from stories of when her grandfather “walked alcohol across the [U.S.-Canada] border” during Prohibition in upstate New York.
Empire of Sin sets aside the action-packed gameplay of other Mob-themed games in favor of turn-based strategy. “The theme itself is strategic,” Romero said in an interview with the gaming news website VentureBeat. “If you watch Boardwalk Empire, it’s pretty clear that there’s all kinds of strategy going on. The movement of resources, how those resources are going to be protected, how they’re going to be sold — it was a real-life strategy game.”
The player selects a main character from a rogues’ gallery of Mob bosses and assembles a crew to build a criminal empire and control Chicago’s underworld. The aim is to achieve this by the end of Prohibition in 1933 through a combination of combat and diplomacy. You can invade other gangs’ territory and defend your own turf from incursions while also having sit-downs with rival bosses to negotiate deals.
Among the bosses to choose from are some of the most well-known crime figures of 1920s Chicago, including Al Capone, Dion O’Banion and Joe Saltis. The developers diversified the roster by bringing in organized crime figures from other cities, including Stephanie St. Clair, Harlem’s “Madam Queen of Policy,” and Sai Wing Mock, aka “Mock Duck,” leader of the Hip Sing Tong in Manhattan’s Chinatown. A new character, Meyer Lansky, the Mob’s financial guru, was added as part of an expansion, but the developers changed his name to Maxim Zelnick to avoid legal trouble.
Although Empire of Sin received mixed reviews, it’s one of the few games that allows the player to build a crime syndicate while dealing with rival gangs and corrupt cops. Most games in the genre have a shoot-first solution to every problem, but this one encourages strategic planning and decision making — like a mobbed-up game of chess. The business management component makes running speakeasies, underground casinos and breweries just as important as taking out the competition.
4. Yakuza 0 — Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, 2015

While Grand Theft Auto was exploding in popularity in America, many game developers tried to catch the trend by programming their own variants of the game. Rather than compete with Western trends, Sega game developer Toshihiro Nagoshi decided to make a game that would instead appeal primarily to a Japanese audience. Ryu ga Gotoku — “Like a Dragon” in English — launched in 2005. Sega changed the name to Yakuza for the international versions. The game was a success in Japan, but it took a decade before the series gained a foothold in America with the release of Yakuza 0, a prequel.
For most of the series, players control Kazuma Kiryu, a yakuza member with a heart of gold who navigates Japan’s underworld. The game’s dramatic storytelling is balanced with over-the-top combat and eccentric side content. Kiryu fights with his fists but also anything he can pick up, including baseball bats, traffic cones and bicycles. In one fighting sequence in the first game, Kiryu opens each door by kicking an enemy through it.
The Yakuza series capitalizes on the elements of organized crime unique to Japan, including real estate extortion, called jiageya (which translates to “person who buys land to resell”). Yakuza commonly blackmailed and intimidated property owners into selling their land at cheap prices to use in lucrative development projects. These dealings exacerbated Japan’s “bubble economy,” which led to an economic crisis in 1992.
Yakuza 0 takes place in the late 1980s amid the bubble, and many of the game’s conflicts arise from groups competing over a prime plot of land. The game contains another nod to this in one of its biggest side missions: “Real Estate Royale.” In that mission, Kiryu vies for control of the real estate properties in Kamurocho. Kamurocho is one of the game’s locations, which is nearly identical to Kabukicho, Tokyo’s red light and entertainment district in the Shinjuku neighborhood.
But what really meshed with American audiences was not its realism but rather its sometimes-wacky side content. Kiryu can let off steam from the stress of work by helping residents and enjoying activities including karaoke, disco dancing and going to the batting cages. In one quest, Kiryu can win a live chicken after scoring a turkey in a bowling minigame. A viral screenshot that contributed to the game’s popularity shows Kiryu saying, “Hello, chicken. Your name will be… Nugget.” Nugget can then be assigned to manage properties in the real estate side mission. In another bizarre mission, Kiryu helps shoot a music video for “Miracle Johnson,” a not-so-subtle nod to “King of Pop” Michael Jackson.
Yakuza is now popular enough in the West that Sega has dropped the adopted name Yakuza and now calls the English version the same as in Japan: Like a Dragon. The latest entry in the series coming out this year is a spinoff starring Kiryu’s rival and Yakuza 0 deuteragonist, Goro Majima, which goes full steam into the silly: Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii.
3. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Rockstar North, 2002

After Sony launched the PlayStation 2 in 2000 with new graphical capabilities, Rockstar Games upgraded the GTA series to 3D graphics with Grand Theft Auto III. It became the best-selling game of 2001. The game dropped to second best in 2002, only because its sequel, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, climbed to the top spot.
Vice City ditches the modern setting of previous games and instead rewinds the clock to 1986 for its fictional version of Miami. As the name and setting imply, 1980s pop culture was the primary influence on the game’s developers.
“You cannot play for more than five minutes and not think about Scarface or Miami Vice, and from that point on you’re playing those roles,” said Vice City producer Leslie Benzies. “And who has never wanted to be Tony Montana on the balcony with his ‘little friend’?”
With the success of their previous titles, Rockstar had the budget to add real star power to the voice cast. Ray Liotta voices the player character, Tommy Vercetti, a made man in the made-up Forelli crime family. Vercetti is sent to Vice City to oversee a drug deal and ends up becoming a Tony Montana-style drug lord. Along the way he encounters a diverse cast of criminals either aiding or inhibiting his rise to power. Among the other well-known actors voicing Vercetti’s co-conspirators and adversaries are Burt Reynolds, Danny Trejo and Miami Vice’s Philip Michael Thomas.
The game was not without its controversies. Along with other games in the series, Vice City has been criticized for its violence, sexual content and depictions of ethnic groups. Rockstar Games offered a formal apology and an updated version of the game in response to the latter. In the game, the player is given carte blanche to commit a variety of violent crimes, although this is discouraged by the “wanted” system that sends the police after the player, escalating with each crime committed (unless you enter a cheat code). Critics have said that’s not enough, however, and have blamed acts of violence on the game’s influence.
In 2004, Rockstar released another follow-up on the PlayStation 2, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, diving into the world of West Coast street gangs inspired by the Los Angeles underworld. With yet another title topping the charts, the GTA series cemented itself as a gold mine for Rockstar Games, which continues later this year with the release of Grand Theft Auto VI. Fans wanting to return to Vice City are in luck, as the latest entry in the series will have the city as one of its main locations.
2. Sleeping Dogs — United Front Games, 2012

Sleeping Dogs takes the player into the world of Chinese organized crime set in modern Hong Kong. Like most of the other games on this list, it takes cues from the GTA series. The game sets itself apart from other GTA facsimiles, however, by putting the player in the role of an undercover cop. Chinese American police officer Wei Shen is transferred to Hong Kong to infiltrate a triad organization and take it down from within. The game’s fictional Sun On Yee is based on the largest triad organization in the world, the Sun Yee On. Likewise, the adversarial 18K triad is not too far from its real-life counterpart: the 14K.
Unlike the Yakuza series, Sleeping Dogs is a game about Asian organized crime developed by a Western team for an international audience. As such, the developers drew inspiration from depictions of undercover cops in both Western and Asian film and television, including Donnie Brasco and Infernal Affairs, the Hong Kong crime drama that was remade into Martin Scorsese’s The Departed. The HBO series The Wire influenced the game’s writers in creating morally ambiguous characters on both sides of the law.
As an undercover, Shen must balance acts that advance his case against the triads while gaining favor with them to maintain his cover. The player has the freedom to make Shen as reckless or as cautious as they want. Violent combat moves, such as shoving an enemy into an electrical box, increases favor with the triads while avoiding civilian casualties and property damage earns points with law enforcement. The game quantifies the paths by giving “Police XP” and “Triad XP” for certain actions and encourages the player to obtain both by offering special upgrades and abilities for each path. Shen’s dealings with corrupt cops and shaky alliances with criminals also make it harder for the player to favor one path over the other.
As one of the only games that center on the triads, Sleeping Dogs is a worthwhile entry in the organized crime genre. There are also few games that put the player in the shoes of an undercover. The game was successful enough that a movie adaptation was announced in 2017 with Ip Man star Donnie Yen as Shen. In January Yen told gaming website Polygon that, unfortunately, the project had been canceled. However, Marvel’s Shang-Chi star Simu Liu announced on X soon after that he has been “working with the rights holders to bring Sleeping Dogs to the big screen.”
1. Mafia: Definitive Edition — Hangar 13, 2020

Of all the games with an organized crime theme, the Mafia series plays the most like a video game version of The Godfather — and that’s by design. “Our creative direction is to deliver the fantasy of playing a Mob movie,” said Alex Cox, director of the latest entry in the series, in an interview with the gaming news website Video Games Chronicle.
Released in 2002 but remade in 2020 as Mafia: Definitive Edition, the first game is set in Lost Heaven, inspired by Chicago, and takes place throughout the 1930s. It begins with taxi driver Tommy Angelo forced at gunpoint to serve as a getaway driver for enforcers in the Salieri crime family. After impressing the mobsters with his driving skills, Angelo gets recruited into the family.
In a plot device straight out of a Mob film, Angelo narrates his rise to power through flashbacks wrapped around a confessional with a detective in a restaurant booth. The player experiences Angelo’s life of crime from his recruitment and promotion to made man to his disillusionment with the Mob and becoming an informant. As with real-world mobsters, Angelo doesn’t join Team America out of the goodness of his heart — it’s all to avoid a lengthy prison sentence.
Throughout the game, Mob boss Ennio Salieri sends Angelo on a variety of missions related to the crime family’s rackets, including smuggling shipments of booze during the tail end of Prohibition and roughing up debtors late on their payments. Soon into the game assassinations join the roster of tasks to complete for the Don, whether it’s taking out rivals, corrupt public officials or people who have been talking too much. In the latter case, Angelo gets his first dose of disillusionment and disobeys the boss by letting the target flee.
Mafia is not a historically accurate take on the Mob, but it is an homage to Mob movies. References to Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola films are peppered through the game. None are more obvious than during an assassination mission aboard a ship. Angelo receives orders to take out a corrupt politician, so he commandeers a sailor’s uniform to sneak aboard. Just like Michael Corleone in the restaurant scene in The Godfather, Angelo fumbles around a bathroom to find a revolver hidden in a toilet.
Most missions in the game feature bloody conflicts with the Morello crime family, a name borrowed from New York mobster Giuseppe Morello. These battles parallel the real-world gang wars of the 1920s, such as Chicago’s “Beer Wars” involving Al Capone. Angelo racks up a body count, however, far exceeding any mobster in real life, which is just a consequence of being a video game protagonist. Removing the hordes of enemies in favor of realism would make for a boring experience.
The two sequels to the 2002 game, Mafia II and Mafia III, explore new settings: post-World War II New York and 1960s New Orleans, respectively. The 2020 remake sold well enough to warrant a fourth entry in the series: Mafia: The Old Country. Coming later this year, the game is a prequel set in early 1900s Sicily. It’s a departure from the America-set titles, but still appropriate for a series heavily influenced by The Godfather.
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