“Matthias Worch, game design director at Hangar 13 studios in California, spoke with The Maroon about the origins of
“Mafia III’s” setting and its choice in a black protagonist named Lincoln Clay. Worch has over 17 years of experience in the industry and is originally from Germany.
“Mafia III” is a video game released in 2016 that takes place in the fictional city of New Bordeaux, a recreation of New Orleans in
the 60’s.
Q: Why New Orleans?
A: “Mafia” as a franchise is very much known for creating these really cinematic stories, setting them in historic times in America and always dealing with major American crime cities. Even though you automatically gravitate towards some obvious contenders like New York or Chicago and so on, New Orleans is one of these major American crime cities that most people didn’t really know about and probably still don’t know about it, unless they played our game. It has this really deep history. In fact, it’s where the Sicilians arrived before they arrived anywhere else in America. Once we realized that [New Orleans has a deep history of organized crime] this was really perfect for us. New Orleans has everything that we look for in a Mafia game: organized crime, the Italians. New Orleans is also one of those cities I feel are quite under-served when it comes to
video games.
Q: Which was decided first? The main protagonist or main setting?
A: It was a little bit of both. We realized that if you were just to create an Italian mobster in that setting, he might not have as much perspective on what’s going on in the world. He might be quite privileged actually. So that’s when I think we hit on Lincoln Clay as a character, and that I think goes hand in hand. We realized, “Oh my god, if we actually did use an African-American or half-black character in this setting, that actually gives us a whole bunch of interesting ways in which we can talk about this time and place.”
*1 Godfather of the mafia, which had strong power in Louisiana and Texas. He lived in New Orleans.
Q: How hard was it to get images of New Orleans in the 60s?
A: One of my favorite pieces of reference was a tourism video from the 60s. I don’t know exactly who made it. I think it may have been a TV news report. It was about an hour long, and it looked at New Orleans, how it was changing through the 60s and how it was a really prominent tourist destination. I just loved seeing that because I hadn’t actually been to New Orleans at that point. We sent a lot of artists and a lot of work designers, but I only got to go later. So it was really good reference for me because I felt like I could look at that video and I could look at the way our game was coming together, and I could see the parallels left and right. Now it was very important for us then to actually make sure that we didn’t just try to recreate New Orleans in the 60s. We very much tried to create New Bordeaux, which is our own version of New Orleans in the 60s, because that allowed us to take various creative licenses and allowed us to change things for how we wanted to change it.
Q: Where was the hardest place to build?
A: I would look at it from two different angles. Technically, the bayou was the hardest to build just because technically that has the most challenges for us. We want to do organic environments. We want to make sure we have tons of vegetation. We have the trees swinging in the wind; we need a lot of them. We want to have grass on the ground, which isn’t all that easy to render. You need to get the water right. Then you need to get wildlife correct as well. Us having gators swimming around for example is something that very much adds to that environment. It wasn’t even that important that we get it 100 percent right to look exactly like the bayou in Louisiana, like near New Orleans, for example. We took some license there, but it just needed to feel like it captured the essence of that. That wasn’t easy technically; I think we did a good job. The bayou is one of my favorite places in New Bordeaux.
If we’re looking at it from a different angle and as something that is creatively the hardest to build, I would probably go to the French Ward, which is our version of the French Quarter because you really have to get that right. And you have to actually make certain concessions with the game, while still keeping the spirit of New Orleans and the French Quarter very much alive. So we needed to make sure, for example, and this is why our city is called New Bordeaux and not New Orleans straight; it’s that we keep this really intricate and really tight streets that you have in the French Quarter alive, and we capture that feel of the old historic buildings, while at the same time making sure it was actually fun to drive around in. So we had to make our streets a little bit wider than you would see anywhere in New Orleans, because otherwise it’s not that much fun having a car chase or a race or trying to escape from the police in these kind of areas. So that took a lot of work to make sure that we got that just right. And on top of that, just like we had gators in the bayou, and you know something only really comes alive when it’s populated. Well, it’s very much the same thing with the French Ward. Because it is one of the most densely populated places in the city, I would think. You certainly have expectations when you go. You want people walking around, partying. You want to have jazz bars opening up into the street. So just the amount of city life we had to put in there, which of course is a technical challenge because you have to keep all that performing. You need to make sure it’s actually running at a certain frame-rate, while accurately capturing what the French Ward or French Quarter is really all about. That’s probably something we spent the most time on.
Q: How did you turn the real city into a digital world?
A: That is a quite involved and intricate process. We have a couple of departments involved. We knew we didn’t just want to recreate New Orleans; we wanted to create our own version of it. So that pretty much allowed us to extract all the essence, all of the really cool parts of New Orleans, and then distill them into our own version of that.
Q: Is there anything you would like to add?
A: It’s been incredible working on “Mafia III” and learning more about New Orleans as we were actually making this game. Being able to draw parallels between our version New Bordeaux and New Orleans, just learning a lot about the city, this is something I really like about games. Both making games and playing games, I feel this is where our medium, video games, can do something that no other medium can do. It can really fully immerse you in a time and place. It can actually experientially bring you closer to a subject matter and to a place. So being able to drive around in our bayou and then going to the real bayou in New Orleans, doing the same thing in the French Ward/French Quarter in New Orleans and just learning a lot about that mafia history has been really cool. And I hope that’s the case for anybody else who plays our game.
