2K's Director of Creative Production, Jack Scalici, is quite a talker when it comes to Mafia 2, a game that he wrote and rewrote until it was pitch perfect to his Italian-American ear. But he's the best kind of talker, because he's got interesting things to say. Such as, ″Who wants their mother to lecture them A), in real life, and B), in a fucking video game?″ or, about main character Vito's partner in crime, Joe, ″He's my motivation to keep playing, because the shit that comes out of his mouth is just crazy.″

Or, about Mafia 2's version of open-worldness, ″You can't just go jerk off on the other end of the city.″

And so in this lengthy interview I conducted along with Bitmob's Omri Petitte, we let him loose.

Bitmob: What do you do at 2K, and on Mafia 2 specifically? And...go!

Jack Scalici: I oversee stuff like script doctoring, story progression, overall narrative of every game, dialogue -- making sure the dialogue sounds like it's from real people, not some video game character, or even worse, comic book character. Overall, writing is a big focus of what we do. Music supervision and music licensing -- making sure each game has an awesome licensed soundtrack if the narrative calls for it, which it did in this case. Anything a developer can't do within their own building but they need to create the game they set out to make, it's my job to make sure they have the help to get it.

With Mafia 2, it needed everything. We tried outsourcing, we tried hiring consultants; it just didn't work, because of how specific this game is, to a specific ethnic group, in a specific part of the world, in a very, very specific culture, where if you deviate from the path, you die. It wasn't space marines. Anyone can do space marines.

Our developer is in the Czech Republic; it's very difficult for someone coming from that culture to come over here and understand everything. And that's what they did, they came over here, the artists took photos, they looked at stuff and did a lot of research, a lot of reading, but at the end of the day they're still Czech. They said, ″We're a bunch of Czech guys, we need someone who speaks the language, who is native to this culture, who grew up around there.″ Well, here I am.

"A lot of people ask me, what movie did you completely rip off, because you guys are game developers and that's all game developers do is rip off movies for their crappy stories and their crappy games."

Like I said, we tried to outsource this stuff -- didn't work. Everything was half-assed. They'd run it by me and be like, what do you think? This is not how we talk, this is not how we act....

It's also very easy to veer into stereotypes for this kind of stuff. I lined 10 people up that were not from New York, or not Italian-Americans, and I said, ″OK, what does the mob mean to you? Give me some words, let's put them up on the board here.″ And it was family, honor, respect, suits, cigars...so there's none of that in the game. I threw it all out. Because that's what everyone's expecting.

A lot of people ask me, what movie did you completely rip off, because you guys are game developers and that's all game developers do is rip off movies for their crappy stories and their crappy games, what did you do for this? It was an original story, actually, from one of the writers at 2K Czech -- [we] didn't really rip anything off.

It's my job to kind of evolve that story and evolve the characters, but my direction to the team of what we ended up with with the final script...we said if you're gonna compare two movies, let's take the two best mob movies. That's The Godfather and Goodfellas. It is not [like] Godfather, it is [like] Goodfellas. Goodfellas is a story about real people on the street, doing what they do. It has absolutely nothing to do with being Italian whatsoever. It has nothing to do with the whole fantasy of the godfather, which is an old man in a tuxedo sitting behind a desk with his cigar or whatever, and his cat, with people kissing his ass all day and him making very important decisions. Running the empire. It's not about that at all.

That's Hollywood's romantic version of what the mafia is. Maybe it does exist somewhere, but most of the wiseguys you meet -- if you go out to certain places, it's really easy to find them, especially where I grew up -- it's not them. They're a lot more like the guys from Goodfellas. So we said this is more a story about guys on the street level doing street-level stuff.

If you think about gameplay-wise, too, what's more fun, making decisions in a mafia simulator or grabbing a gun and jumping in a convertible, going to shoot some guy and put him in the trunk? That's where the gameplay aspect of it comes in. That's what we did with the game -- we made sure everything Vito and Joe do is driven by the fact that they are wiseguys, and it's driven by their story. 

Bitmob: So you made sure the game ″felt″ right -- can you get into some of the specific things you had to tweak?

JS: Daniel Vavra, the original writer at 2K Czech before he left the company, he wrote this story in about 2002, right after Mafia 1 shipped. It was designed as a PS2 game because that's what was big back then. And early on when you start writing, you write stuff that is not your best work. Over the years with the technical changes that the game required, because we hit another console generation...we can do a hundred times more than we could. Now the game design has to evolve, and his style as a writer also evolved.

So it went through several revisions, and once they got something that they were reasonably happy with, it had to go to the publisher...they sent me the script, and it had been translated from the original Czech into English, and over there they learn British English. So it was in Czechlish, basically, we call it. Czechlish is my favorite thing about Mafia 2 -- Czech guys writing in English often sounds humorous when you're trying to do mob stuff, when you have wiseguys speaking like my Czech friends do in English.

"We don't all walk around saying it [forgetaboutit] all the time like you think we do in a fucking Prego commercial or something."

We had the characters there, and I kind of just helped the writer adjust the relationships between the characters to fit more with what the mob would do. I'm like, look, if he spoke to this guy like this, he'd be dead the next day. So we adjusted the dialogue, and then I rewrote all the dialogue to what you hear today; hopefully the dialogue sounds pretty legit.

And then I hired actors who could pull off the dialogue, which is a really, really, hard thing to do. I didn't realize how hard it was going to be until I heard a lot of the L.A.-based actors auditioning. It got to the point where I was just like, OK, look, if you weren't born within 50 miles of New York City, don't even try. Because it's embarrassing, it's annoying. The word ″forgetaboutit,″ I kept telling them, that wasn't around in the 50s. And we don't all walk around saying it all the time like you think we do in a fucking Prego commercial or something, so please don't say it. And every audition you get some jackass who's like, ″Eh, forgetaboutit, my name's like, forgetaboutit.″ You sound like an asshole. Goodbye.

But then I finally found the guy who matched each character. Joe [the wingman] was, by far, my favorite character to work on. When I found Bobby Costanzo, I was like, holy shit this guy is Joe. He's been in over 200 movies, he's played a similar character, not quite to this level, but he's played supporting characters in all these movies. I handed him the script and he was like, ″Hey, this is good writing, all right,″ while everyone else who got the script was mispronouncing the words -- especially all the Italian and Sicilian words he has to say. When I found him it was great.

Bitmob: Got some outtakes we could have?

JS: Oh god, I have four years of outtakes. I don't know what we're going to do with them -- right now they're my private collection of outtakes. I have some pretty ridiculous stories, and we recorded some audio that would never, ever have made it into the final game. But we saved it, just because it was...wow, that's never going to happen again as long as I live, let's just keep this.

Every game developer starts off with placeholder voice for animation and timing purposes, so they did it [at 2K Czech] speaking English. So we actually have it where Vito and Joe are speaking Czechlish.

Bitmob: Mafia 2 takes place in an open world, but it's also very narrative-driven -- what about side missions? Love interests?

JS: We said to the designers, OK, what else can we do besides Vito makes money, saves his family, works his way up in the mob and has a grand downfall, like you see in every great story. They came up with all sorts of ideas, and we looked at them -- narrative drives this game, story drives this game, you're a mobster, you're not some thug on the streets. You're not an immigrant -- well, you are an immigrant, but you grew up in America, so you're an American wiseguy, and you must behave a certain way. So delivering pizzas? That's out. Driving a taxi? That's out. Saving a little old lady's cat caught in a tree? That's out.

"Women complicate things. Just like in real life, in video games, women really, really complicate things."

What we ended up with, stuff that Vito would actually do if Vito were a real person, was wiseguy stuff. It fit with his character, it fit with the story, and then if we were to make those optional side missions, you'd miss a big part of who Vito is, so we made it all mandatory.

There's a couple little optional things, like if you remember -- this is in an early demo from Gamescom I think, a year and a half ago -- there's a car accident with Joe's girlfriend, she gets into an accident with a greaser. Vito's walking by and he can stop and intervene, and use the fact that this guy's fucking with his best friend's girlfriend to beat the living shit out of the guy, which is something that Vito would do, or he could just walk right by.

Women complicate things. Just like in real life, in video games, women really, really complicate things. It's difficult to make a player fall in love with a character. If they don't fall in love with the character and the actress playing the character, it's melodrama, it's not drama. If you're thinking to yourself, ″Oh, I see where they're going with this,″ instead of saying, ″Whoa, I'm in love with that girl,″ then the developer has failed.