Wow, yeah, to say that "Mafia doesn't contain any licensed music" is really misleading and confusing. Like potential customers are just supposed to know that actually means "THIS VERSION OF MAFIA IS MISSING LICENCED MUSIC THAT WAS PREVIOUSLY PART OF THE GAME." Like, fuck, have some fucking balls and state your shit clearly.

I'm glad I read the comments so I could actually know WTF is up with this release. GOG should be ashamed.

Tutorial to restore the music!
https://www.gog.com/forum/mafia/tutorial_how_to_restore_the_original_music

Do you mean they should have said that all music that isn't the (composer's name)'s musical score has been removed because of licensing issues? To me, licensed music refers to in-game radio songs or generally songs with lyrics.

Your arguments boil down to that the game is good because it is a fairly realistic simulator in some ways. It certainly does take itself seriously and goes to great lengths to make it feel period accurate. That doesn't make it fun and engaging though. How the cars handle and how the characters choose to drive safely or not is completely irrelevant to a story about organised crime. Mafia 2 and 3 dialed back on the painstaking mundane "realism" and kept all the authenticity, while making the actual gameplay tighter and more engaging. Mafia 1 wastes time and lacks any kind of pacing by making the player sit through lengthy gameplay that is not really part of the story. "And then Tommy went to see Vincenzo who gave him a gun, and then Tommy went to see Ralphie who showed him how to break into a new car, and then Tommy drove Paulie to the countryside" << This is not a story, but goodness gracious, does the game show me every painstaking minute of the day in the life of a 30's gangster. I'm thankful I don't have to wipe Tommy's butt in gameplay as well.

Sorry, I can't give any concessions to the story and characters either. The story is a bog standard romanticized mafia tale. It is not well paced, it takes a long time to get anywhere because of slow and lengthy gameplay segments and it relies too heavily on referencing cinema without infringing on copyrights. The characters are completely unremarkable recreations of mafia cinema archetypes. The voice acting is typical for early 00's games. The game is a product of it's time where they really tried to recreate the movies but the production values were still unattainable. It would take a few more years before game developers realized they have a unique medium to work with and they don't need to follow in the footsteps of the film industry.

Mafia 1 is a game, not a movie. It kinda sucks at being a game though, and it's a rough and too early attempt at recreating the movies. Mafia 2 improved every aspect of game design, had an original story that is suitable for a game and amazing production values (Looks and sounds good, plays good). Mafia 1 is a curious entry into gaming history but on it's own a very mediocre and unremarkable game.

I also have fond memories of this game. It truly is one of a kind.

What I liked:
- The licensed music (the OST - aka the Orchestral soundtrack - is lackluster)
- The attention to details in regards to the city, the cars and the characters
- The story, although cliche, felt really good
- No silly or out of place side-missions, fetch quests or collectibles detracting from the immersion
- Clean and simple UI

I have zero recollection of the Orchestral soundtrack, that's how forgettable it is. It didn't stick with me over the years as the licensed songs did (which upon listening to on Youtube immediately brought back memories of driving through the city). The OST was more Hollywood like, and that's what made it be forgettable. Where is the jazzy feel to it? The picks of acoustic guitars? The violins?

This game was way ahead of its time, completely outclassing GTA III in most respects. I thought all the music was well out of copyright? Or has Mickey Mouse had a predictable domino effect on copyright law?

At 'life of the artist plus 75 years', there is very little recorded music that's out of copyright. The performer would have had to have died before 1942, *and* their estate didn't renew it further.

There was a brief period where copyright had to be manually renewed regularly, but not much fell out of it then.

Basically, copyright is forever, nothing will ever fall into the public domain again. (In the US, anyway.)

Epic release, nuff said.

But picture Mafia 1 being re-released on the psn or xbox games on demand. What would you do?! Play the ost on your stereo while the game's running?! :P

Just adding a link to what appears to be a false positive virus report:

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/mafia_trojan_virus_detected_windows_defender

Nothing against the reporter. Just added as a fyi if folks want to scan their downloads and report on it. Win32/Fuerboos.B!cl appears to be a catch all for Windows Defender instead of a specific threat.

Wow, nice to see this here, been wanting to get my grubby mitts on it.

In my opinion that's bull. I haven't played Mafia 3 yet but Mafia 2 is in my opinion worse than Mafia 1 (and everything I've heard about Mafia 3 suggests that it's even worse than Mafia 2). Anyway, I care as little about the fact that large chunks of the story and characters in Mafia are hugely copied from famous mafia films as I care about the fact that tons of motifs and even specific designs in the Silent Hill series are taken directly from famous and rather obscure films. Just like with the Silent Hill series I feel that Mafia 1's way of reappropriating content from cinema made it something grander and more sophisticated than any of the source materials. A bold claim that cinemaphiles will undoubtedly cringe their teeth over but I stand by it. The developers did a great job of modelling their characters after famous characters from classics like Good Fellas and then brilliantly broke expectations, they made them more real and human than the originals which were merely archetypes. And Mafia 1's character development and writing haven't aged one bit. Well, besides the unnecessary racing episode and a weird break towards the end of the game that I'm not going to go much into to avoid spoiling the game for curious GOGers reading my post - but technically those haven't aged badly, they were crap when the game was new. Anyway, Mafia 1 remains in my opinion one of the best games of all time in this regard and Mafia 2 doesn't even get close.

And sure, the combat mechanics have aged and the difficulty curve is beyond ridiculous, however, the experience I get from combat in Mafia 1 actually remains more exciting and rewarding than the one I had in Mafia 2 with its lackluster cover-based combat with auto recovery which makes things ridiculously easy, ruins the pacing and makes the protagonist appear like an inhuman killing machine that just doesn't fit into the story that requires human life to be remotely fragile.

And as for the music: first off, you have misused the term "diagetic". "Diagetic" means that the audio you hear comes from a source in the game world. That is not the case. GTA's radio is diagetic, the source of the music is your car's radio, in Mafia you usually just hear different songs that are meant to reflect the different districts of this fake Chicago. Secondly, saying that the music isn't good is just crazy. The songs chosen for the game are classics from that era, most of the music is by Django Reinhardt, a friggin' legend who is, to quote Wikipedia, "regarded as one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century". Other good chunks of the soundtrack are by The Mills Brothers and Louis Prima. Don't get me wrong, their works aren't among my favourite music, but you are kinda making a fool of yourself when you lambaste some of the most influential and famous musicians' compositions and performances of an era like this.

And I don't know how you can possibly say that the licensed music "isn't really part of the mood". The licensed music is not adjusted to the story, no, but it is absolutely adjusted to the era and that's exactly what the sequences where you just drive around the city between missions are about. You just friggin' inhale the zeitgeist, it immensely strengthens the immersion. Not in the "oh, so realistic" sense but that you get a feeling for the time period the game is based in. And personally I like to think that the fact that things can really go to shit while the uplifting music is playing is in itself something pretty amazing. Heck, there are movies where this is done intentionally, from what I recall there actually was a scene in Good Fellas where you see people getting brutally murdered while some rather upbeat rock song from the time period is playing. It suggests that the crazy shit you're seeing is simply part of that era, almost mundane, and it's the moments where you get a different view at your hero, Tommy Angelo. Not the guy with a conscience that he is presented as throughout most of the story but the guy he has chosen to be but pretends he is not: a mobster, member of a self-declared elite that leads a life of luxury and doesn't value the life of others at all. I think the use of this period-music during the sections where the game doesn't put any limitations on your actions, while possibly unintentional, has a brilliant and powerful effect on the experience as a whole.

Incredible! A good solution to drive around the song license problem.

Everything from the "1923-1963" period will start entering public domain in the US from 2019 and onwards. That, of course, assumes that there won't be yet another copyright extension.

Why are people pissed at GOG for releasing this without the licenced music? You do realise that it's this way or no way, right?

As much as it's disappointing that a lot of the atmosphere of the original version is lost without the music, it's not something that GOG have any control over.

I'm really happy to see this release. I've been a fan of the original Mafia since it first came out. Yes, the controls are clunky, and the combat difficulty is high (especially the museum level, WOW is it punishing.) It has great atmosphere and story, optional side missions, and the graphics were great for its time. Compared to contemporary games like GTA III this game was way ahead of the curve.

Great game, but I still have my PC disc version and it it works, and I don't pay licenses twice for the same thing. So I won't buy the GOG version since I don't need to.

One thing, the screenshots are stretched. The dials should be round when in the games 4:3 ratio. If you don't mind stretching as a false widescreen mode, fair enough. But I prefer it in 4:3 and l when I last played I couldn't find a way to make it true widescreen with correct field of view. Hopefully someone will come up with a true widescreen patch mod now it's available again.

Honestly, I didn't think the games soundtrack was anywhere near the ones in Mafia 2 or 3 anyway. Anyone that thinks this game was going to release again with the original music licenses renewed is out of touch with reality. The costs of re-licensing would result in an early 2000 era game priced at full price instead of A$14, and how many people would buy it at the higher price? You may as well just look for an original disc version. Or just mod this one, it's not hard.