![]() ![]() Towards the end of the original game I also was helping to lead the team, which led to a role as Animation Director on Mafia II and Media Director on Mafia III. But it was huge for us, and we got very creative for instance, for scenes with a bunch of guys shooting at one another, we had to choreograph the whole shootout while only being able to record the actors one by one. I was also into new technology, so I convinced the team to purchase a motion capture setup-it had a magnetic field base, only covered 2x2 meters, and could only fit one actor at a time. As the Director of Photography on the original Mafia, I wanted to bring film-grade cinematography to the game. I was also making amateur movies with a friend of mine back then that's how I learned the craft of camera animation. I was always into visual effects I remember being inspired and motivated to study visual effects from watching movies like Terminator 2 on VHS. When we started, it was a different game concept entirely for a couple months before Daniel Vávra, the writer of the original Mafia, brought up the idea of doing a gangster game. Tomáš Hřebíček: I started at the same time as Roman when we formed the team for the original Mafia. That said, I mostly got to keep the work on lighting and atmospheric effects to myself, which I always liked. For Mafia: Definitive Edition, it was too much to do both the Art Director and General Manager work at the same time, so I asked our former colleague Petr Motejzík to join the team as the Art Director on Mafia: Definitive Edition. ![]() On Mafia III, I was in charge of the team in the Czech Republic as a supporting Art Director, mostly doing art production and outsourcing.įollowing Mafia III, I got a chance to become a studio head-General Manager, if you will, which is what I'm doing now. Mafia III was when we established the Hangar 13 team in Novato, with a couple of people from the Czech Republic moved to the US to work on it. We were still doing work on the console ports of the first Mafia, and we had to change Mafia II's game engine midway through the development, so it was a bit of a struggle. That was probably the longest development we experienced, around eight years. On Mafia II I got a chance to step up into the role of Art Director. Eventually we grew to 10 people when we finished, it was a development team of around 20-25 people. When we started on the original Mafia, it was just four or five people. ![]() Originally I joined the team as a 2D artist, learning a little bit of 3D, but I became a character artist on the original Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven. Roman Hladík: I've been with the company-which was originally Illusion Softworks, an independent game developer in the Czech Republic-since probably the summer of '97, so I'll have been here about 25 years this year. What role did you have when you first started working on the Mafia series, and how has it evolved in the years since? Hladík, Hřebíček, and Cox show up in the games via these Wanted poster collectibles. Read on to hear their stories as they look back on the last 20 years of making Mafia, covering their history with the franchise and sharing some of their favorite moments-along with a special announcement about the future of the Mafia series. To commemorate Mafia's 20th Anniversary, we spoke to some longtime Hangar 13 developers: General Manager Roman Hladík and Head of Production and Media Director Tomáš Hřebíček have worked on every game in the series starting with the original, while Game Director Alex Cox has been with the series since Mafia II. Whether it was the humble beginnings of a tiny development team working on a game that initially had nothing to do with organized crime, to finding just the right way to modernize and build on the vision of the game that started it all, there have been plenty of challenges along the way. It's been one hell of a ride, from the very first Mafia to Mafia II, Mafia III, and the faithful, ground-up remake of Mafia: Definitive Edition. As of August 2022, it's been two decades since the iconic Mafia series made its debut with Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven. Let's raise a glass to everyone who's been a part of this amazing Mafia community over the past 20 years. ![]()
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