In the mid-00’s, we were fully in the phase of others working out what they could learn from the success of Grand Theft Auto. Some of this came in the form of applying its principles to other genres. A lot of it came in developers taking more direct inspiration, and trying to work out ways to reproduce it while distinguishing their version, and The Godfather is the first of two of them to get to #1 in 2006. It has a few different minor innovations, most of which are through a focus on the mafia encompassing a famous filmic vision of it.
The approach EA took is similar to that of Universal when they looked at their back catalogue for potential games and ended up with The Thing. There, a proof of concept of sorts had been presented by the Antarctic horror of Extermination, so even better to go straight to its source. The 3D Grand Theft Auto games didn’t draw on only The Godfather, but there is a reason why Grand Theft Auto III started with Italian-Americans in a version of New York City. Many of the genre tropes it was parodying/retreading either started from The Godfather or got a big leg-up from it, so where better to go to retell those tropes more straight?
The Godfather the game isn’t exactly a retelling of the book or film though, but a story woven through it. It’s kind of similar to Enter the Matrix, except that the film wasn’t designed with a video game three decades later in mind, so lends itself less easily to the gaps. Your character is a Forrest Gump-type figure who ends up being present at every major event, from horse’s heads to consignments to sleep with the fishes, while supposedly still being insignificant. This puts a bit of a strain on the narrative in the early stages especially. The menu will remind you of your position as “Rank: Outsider” and yet the Corleone mob will trust you with crucial roles and proximity to the injured Don.
This approach also gives a weird gravity to the characters from the film. They even look more detailed than everyone else around them. Or, as succinctly put by The Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola when distancing himself from the game as a “misuse of film”: “They use the characters everyone knows, and they hire those actors to be there, and only to introduce minor characters. And then for the next hour they shoot and kill each other.” (He later went on to lead a Kickstarter effort for a video game version of Apocalypse Now, so it doesn’t seem to have been coming from any deeply held objection to video games).
There is indeed a lot of shooting and killing in The Godfather, not the only thing brought from its obvious game influences. Being able to hijack any car anywhere feels unnecessary and clumsy much of the time, but it’s what Grand Theft Auto players had come to expect so it’s in. The shooting is developed a bit more. The cover system and partly assisted aiming that encourages you to go for kneecaps is nicely balanced, and some of the set pieces making your way through buildings of enemies are better executed than in many rivals. But it butts up against the considered tone of the narrative a fair bit, even in the world of gangsters.
There is one bit one where you’re told to kill a senior police officer and make it look like an accident, and need to carefully throw him off a balcony before a cutscene shows a bottle of spirits being dropped after him to complete the effect. All very smart, but it misses that his many dead colleagues that you shot in the kneecaps on your way to get to him would probably clue people in on the non-accidental nature.
It’s outside of the main story, when the same attitude to little people becomes more thoroughly textual, that The Godfather takes on a more unique feel. Its biggest innovation is not the ‘40s setting or mostly serious tone, but the ability to spread your influence through a system which puts the ‘organised’ into organised crime. All around the city you can find venues and intimidate their owners into giving you protection money, opening up a route into a network of back-room illegal activity and supply warehouses. The way the intimidation is handled, you can start off asking someone and usually getting turned down, before getting more aggressive. That can mean attacking them but also beating up their tills, fridges, and anything else breakable, with a meter to measure intimidation hitting the sweet spot before going too far. Soon enough in this part of the game, admittedly, you get into more fighting with hordes of people with guns. Before that, though, lording it over cowering shopkeepers feels tangibly powerful and monstrous in a way that is startling amidst such otherwise routine material.
Top of the charts for week ending 1 April 2006:
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