It’s hard to talk about modern video games without mentioning the influence of Grand Theft Auto. Rockstar’s iconic crime franchise has grown from a controversial PlayStation 1 classic to a universally recognised cultural behemoth, with its most recent entry, Grand Theft Auto 5, becoming one of the best-selling games of all time.

However, the series didn’t grow into a landmark success overnight. Rockstar has been slowly building its iconic crime series for over two decades, creating hyper-immersive open worlds that players explore for years after their release. With over sixteen Grand Theft Auto games dropping since the franchise began in 1997, new players are probably wondering where to start.

To help you get stuck in, we’ve listed every GTA game in chronological order so you can plot the best route through the timeline of this crime-riddled world. Until we finally get our hands on GTA 6, at least.

Jump to:

• How to Play in Chronological Order
  • The 2D Timeline
  • The 3D Timeline
  • The HD Timeline
• GTA Release Dates

The Grand Theft Auto Games in Order

There are a total of 16 games in the Grand Theft Auto series – eleven on home consoles, one on PC and four on handheld devices. The next Grand Theft Auto game, GTA 6, is set to release in November 2026.

Before we dive into the list, it’s first worth noting an important detail about the overall continuity of Grand Theft Auto. As confirmed by Rockstar back in 2011, the GTA series is split into three unique timelines: the 2D timeline, the 3D timeline and the HD timeline. Although events in these timelines might be similar or even identical, Rockstar doesn’t consider all of them canon to each other. As such, we’ll separate the games into their respective universes.

Which GTA Game Should You Play First?

If you're wanting to get into the Grand Theft Auto games before GTA 6 arrives, you will likely want to start with the latest in the series: GTA 5. You can certainly go back to previous games, but GTA 5 is a masterpiece in it's own right and is playable pretty much everywhere. You can also take advantage of GTA Online for multiplayer.

Otherwise, we're pretty close to that GTA 6 finish line, so if you happen to have a console, I wouldn't hold out on being a part of one of the biggest game launches of all time.

The Grand Theft Auto 2D Timeline

Below, we’ll list the Grand Theft Auto games from the 2D universe. These blurbs contain mild spoilers for each game, including characters, settings, and story beats.

1. Grand Theft Auto: London 1961

The second expansion released for the original Grand Theft Auto, Grand Theft Auto: London 1961 is one of only two GTA releases to not hit a PlayStation console, with the DLC only available to PC players.

The mission pack acts as a prequel to Grand Theft Auto’s first expansion, Grand Theft Auto: London 1969. It follows a nameless criminal rising through the ranks of the London crime families by completing jobs for a mobster called Harold Cartwright.

2. Grand Theft Auto: London 1969

The first expansion for the original Grand Theft Auto, Grand Theft Auto: London 1969 marked the series’ first visit to London.

The tale follows a nameless British criminal who fights against various crime syndicates while building their legend on the city’s streets. These include Harold Cartwright’s gang, which the player joins forces with in Grand Theft Auto: London 1961, as well as a pair of sinister crime lords known as the Crisp Twins.

3. Grand Theft Auto

The first entry in the mainline series, Grand Theft Auto follows the adventures of a nameless protagonist as they make their mark on the criminal underworlds of three locations: Liberty City, San Andreas and Vice City.

Set in 1997, the criminal’s adventures see them complete bank heists, assassinations and getaways, building their reputation while aiding various sinister gangs. Along the way, they meet a host of high-ranking criminals, including Robert Seragliano, El Burro and Uncle Fu.

4. Grand Theft Auto 2

The second mainline entry in the series, Grand Theft Auto 2 is arguably the biggest departure for the series to date. Shifting away from the setting of the first GTA, it takes players to a nigh-on futuristic metropolis known as Anywhere City, which bears no striking resemblance to any other location in the series.

The adventure follows a criminal named Claude Speed, who works with various crime syndicates around Anywhere City to make money and earn respect. The game’s position on the timeline is tricky, mainly as in-game references allude to it taking place in both 1999 and 2013. Regardless, it’s the final game in the 2D timeline.

The Grand Theft Auto 3D Timeline

Below, we’ll list the Grand Theft Auto games from the 3D universe. These blurbs contain mild spoilers for each game, including characters, settings, and story beats.

1. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories

A prequel to Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, the PSP’s Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories takes place in 1984 and follows US military soldier Victor Vance who, after being framed by his sergeant, is dishonorably discharged.

Fresh out of a job, he decides to enter Vice City’s underworld, quickly becoming the head of a crime family with the help of his brother, Lance. The pair embark on an adventure to disrupt Vice City’s crime scene, meeting and recruiting a variety of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City’s supporting characters along the way. By the time the game wraps up, Vic’s story catches up with the beginning of Vice City.

2. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

The fourth mainline iteration of the series, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City takes place in 1986; two years after Vice City Stories. It follows Tommy Verceti, a notorious gangster from Liberty City who is sent to Vice City to oversee the expansion of his boss’ drug trade after being released from jail.

Tommy lands in hot water after a supposedly simple drug deal goes horribly wrong. Losing the drugs and money exchanged in the deal, Tommy is given one last chance to make things right.

To redeem himself, he dives into the seedy underbelly of Vice City, allying with Lance Vance to take on its various crime families and find the drugs and money stolen from him. As he becomes a bigger name around Vice City, he slowly creates a growing criminal empire, which doesn’t go unnoticed by his former employers.

3. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

The fifth mainline iteration of the series, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas tells the story of Carl ‘CJ’ Johnson and the Grove Street Families.

Set in 1992, San Andreas follows CJ as he returns to Los Santos after his mother is killed in a drive-by meant to assassinate his brother. Reuniting with his friends, family and local gang, The Grove Street Families, it doesn’t take long for CJ to get stuck back into the criminal underworld, vowing to get revenge on the gang that murdered his mother.

While CJ attempts to rebuild the Grove Street gang’s former glory, it becomes clear that something shady is happening behind the scenes. Pursued by a crooked cop named Officer Tenpenny, CJ deals with betrayal, corrupt law enforcement and the various factions vying for control of Los Santos and the neighboring cities of San Fierro and Las Venturas.

4. Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories

Set in 1998, Liberty City Stories acts as a prequel to Grand Theft Auto 3 and follows a gangster working for Salvatore Leone named Toni Cipriani. Returning to Liberty City after fleeing to Italy to escape the repercussions of assassinating a member of the mafia, Toni gets stuck back in working for his former boss.

Along the way, he meets several high-level mafia contacts and climbs through the ranks of Sal’s gang, murdering rival crime lords and assisting Leone’s attempts to gain political sway with the mayor. The story concludes with Salvatore Leone’s family standing as one the most powerful crime syndicates in Liberty City, setting up the events of Grand Theft Auto 3.

5. Grand Theft Auto Advance

Taking place in 2000, Grand Theft Auto Advance was a Grand Theft Auto 3 prequel released on the Gameboy Advance. It follows a criminal named Mike as he attempts to get revenge for the death of his partner, Vinnie.

Deciding to leave Liberty City and find new opportunities elsewhere, the story begins with Mike and Vinnie completing jobs for the mafia in an attempt to tie up loose ends and fund their escape. However, the plan falls apart when Vinnie is killed with a car bomb, driving Mike to find and kill his murderers. In pursuit of vengeance, Mike teams with various Grand Theft Auto 3 characters, including 8-Ball and Asuka Kasen.

6. Grand Theft Auto 3

The final entry in the timeline but the first game of the 3D era by release date, Grand Theft Auto 3 takes place in 2001 and follows a new Claude, a bank robber that’s shot and left for dead by his girlfriend, Catalina, during a heist.

Claude survives but is arrested and sentenced to life in jail. However, while en route to prison, Claude manages to escape after the Columbian Cartel raided his convoy in search of another prisoner. Fleeing the scene, Claude is soon inducted into the criminal underworld of Liberty City, working with the mafia, the yakuza and various other syndicates.

Although he rises to become one of the city’s most notorious gangsters, Claude’s goal quickly becomes one of vengeance, as his path eventually crosses with Catalina, setting up an inevitable confrontation between the former couple.

The Grand Theft Auto HD Timeline

Below, we’ll list the Grand Theft Auto games from the HD universe. These blurbs contain mild spoilers for each game, including characters, settings, and story beats.

1. Grand Theft Auto 4

The first game of the HD era, Grand Theft Auto 4 takes place in 2008 and follows an Eastern European ex-soldier named Niko Bellic as he makes his way to Liberty City. Coming to America to reunite with his cousin, Roman Bellic, who has allegedly found fortune after moving to Liberty City, Niko is shocked to find Roman is actually broke, living in a cockroach-infested apartment and running a failing business.

It doesn’t take long for Niko to find work and amass cash through less-than-legal means, meeting and befriending an arms dealer named Little Jacob and working off Roman’s debts with a Russian loan shark named Vlad Glebov. However, after discovering that Vlad has been sleeping with Roman’s girlfriend, Niko kills him, sparking a chain of events which puts him and Roman in the sights of the Russian mafia.

To survive, Niko allies with the crime families of Liberty City, where he becomes tangled in their politics and becomes one of the city’s most feared criminals. All the while, Niko has an ulterior motive, wanting to track down and murder a former comrade from his days in the military that double-crossed him and his squad.

2. Grand Theft Auto: The Lost and The Damned

Set during the events of Grand Theft Auto 4, The Lost and the Damned was GTA 4’s first expansion. It follows Johnny Klebitz, the Vice President of a revered motorcycle gang called The Lost MC.

Released from a long stint in rehab, the story opens with The Lost MC’s President, Billy Grey, returning to the gang and reassuming his position as its leader. During his time away, Johnny led The Lost MC, forming a truce with the gang’s main rivals, The Angels of Death. Once reinstated, Billy and Johnny begin to clash after Billy orders The Lost to break the truce with the Angels of Death, starting a ruthless gang war.

As the two gangs battle it out, Billy begins to lead The Lost down a self-destructive path, guiding his brothers into increasingly dangerous situations. With civil war brewing in the group, Johnny is forced to consider where his loyalty lies.

3. Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony

The second of GTA 4’s expansions, The Ballad of Gay Tony also takes place alongside the core Grand Theft Auto campaign. The story follows bodyguard Luis Lopez as he tries to save the life of his boss and legendary nightclub owner, Tony Prince.

Although Tony is a fixture of Liberty City’s nightlife scene, his businesses are failing. To make matters worse, he’s also in debt to the Ancelotti crime family, who are ready to collect what they’re owed. Swearing to help his boss, Luis tries to square Tony’s debts, helping out his various criminal acquaintances.

It all crescendos with a risky plan from Tony, who decides to acquire millions of dollars worth of smuggled diamonds and exchange them in a deal. However, the plan falls apart, leading Luis on a wild goose chase around Liberty City in an attempt to retrieve the diamonds and keep Tony’s debts from catching up with him.

4. Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

Taking place in 2009, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars tells the story of Huang Lee, the son of a murdered Triad leader who is tasked with flying to Liberty City to deliver an ancient sword to his uncle.

After arriving in Liberty City, Huang is ambushed, with his attackers stealing the sword and shooting Huang. Believing him dead, they dump his body, allowing Huang to escape alive. Reuniting with his uncle, Huang embarks on an adventure to track down the sword and deliver it back to the Triads. Along the way, he works with various gangs and the FIB, learning that the sword’s theft may have been an inside job.

5. Grand Theft Auto Online

Although it’s difficult to judge where exactly it falls on the timeline, Grand Theft Auto Online begins shortly before Grand Theft Auto 5 and has, over the course of ten years of updates, shifted to a period of time long after the game’s main campaign.

The core story follows a player-created criminal that heads to Los Santos to find fortune, reputation and fame, creating factions, buying property and taking part in criminal ventures. The story has evolved over the years, with one of the latest updates revisiting the character of Franklin years after the events of Grand Theft Auto V, as he tasks the player with helping him in his business ventures.

6. Grand Theft Auto 5

Set in 2013, Grand Theft Auto 5 follows the story of three criminals: Franklin, Michael and Trevor. After staging his death during a bank robbery in the small town of North Yankton, Michael Townley enters a witness protection programme, moving to the sunny city of Los Santos to live a life of luxury in a giant mansion with his family.

However, he’s lured out of retirement when he meets Franklin Clinton, an ambitious small-time criminal sent to repossess Michael’s son’s car. Forming a friendship, Michael begins to mentor Franklin, eventually leading the pair to rob a jewelry store to pay off a local crime lord. However, the act doesn’t go unnoticed.

On the outskirts of Los Santos, Michael’s former friend and criminal associate, Trevor Phillips, watches a clip of the heist on the news. Realizing that his seemingly dead partner is still alive in Los Santos, Trevor heads to the city, joining Michael and Franklin to stage various elaborate heists. However, Trevor’s animosity towards Michael’s betrayal begins to drive a wedge between the group, as tensions rise and the truth behind the pair’s past comes to light.

Everything We Know About GTA 6

While Take-Two Interactive initially announced a fall 2025 release window, GTA 6 is now slated to be released on November 19, 2026. And Rockstar actually seems pretty confident in that date, having opened preorders for the game in late June. Those preorders confirmed the existence of separate Standard and Ultimate editions, as well as the fact that the game won't include a physical disc, at least at launch. Rockstar has also confirmed the game will only be playable on consoles at launch. Nonetheless, it's already become one of the best-selling games of the year.

Double Fine Productions, who recently regained the rights to its entire catalog following its pivot back to independence after Microsoft parted ways with several studios during its "Xbox reset," is honoring Tim Curry by making Brutal Legend free to download and own on PC for 666 minutes – until 3:06am PT/6:06am ET on Thursday, August 27.

Curry, who passed away today at the age of 80, voiced Doviculus in Double Fine founder Tim Schafer's 2009 heavy metal strategy game Brutal Legend. "Rest in peace, dark prince," the company wrote on its itch.io page where you can download the game on PC. IGN's own Daemon Hatfield loved Brutal Legend, giving it a 9 out of 10 in his review. "Brutal Legend is a tour de force that wraps up humor, music, and clever gameplay into one highly polished package," Daemon wrote. "You haven't played a game quite like this before and won't want to miss it."

Curry was perhaps best known for his role in the cult classic film The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but also appeared in many video games besides Brutal Legend, including Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 (back in the FMV cutscene days!), Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, and Dragon Age: Origins.

Double Fine, meanwhile, has announced that it is using its newfound independence to bring back its Amnesia Fortnight game jam as it looks to create its next project(s).

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, and a co-host of Next-Gen Console Watch. He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.

An ex-Naughty Dog designer believes that Uncharted 2's success may have negatively impacted the way Uncharted 3 was developed.

When speaking with FRVR, ex-Naughty Dog designer Benson Russell revealed that Uncharted 2's over-the-top setpieces may have negatively impacted Uncharted 3. He noted that the big set pieces, such as the train sequence, all came organically when producing the game, but that wasn't the case for Uncharted 3. Instead, the team came up with 10 or 12 set pieces, such as the cargo plane sequence, and came up with a plan to decide on a small handful that would actually make it into the game at a later date.

Unfortunately, that never happened, and almost all of them made it into the final product. As a result, writer and director Amy Hennig was forced into a situation where she had to write all of these big set pieces into the game because the designers had already started working on them.

“It also kind of corners Amy [Hennig] a bit, right?” he said. “Because it’s like, ‘Oh, these are the set pieces we want to do,’ and she’s like, ‘Well, now I have to find a way to shoehorn the ship in, so I guess we’ll have pirates and they’ll have a pirate leader.'"

Russell went on to say that he believes making the game in this way was "a big flaw." Uncharted 3 sold exceptionally well and was highly reviewed, even scoring a 10/10 from IGN at the time. However, it does rank lower on the list when compared to other games in the series. The cargo plane sequence, however, is a standout moment that even made its way into the Uncharted live-action film a decade later.

Naughty Dog concluded the Uncharted series back in 2016, but there are rumors that the studio is returning for Uncharted 5 soon. Although its only announced title is Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, Naughty Dog has confirmed that it has multiple projects in the works. As for when we'll start to see those other games, it's hard to say, but it wouldn't be surprising if they follow Intergalatic in a relatively rapid succession.

Cade Onder is a freelancer for IGN's news team. He covers all things entertainment, including gaming, film, and more. You can find him on Twitter @Cade_Onder.

The collaborative relationship between LEGO and Nintendo, two world leaders in family-friendly entertainment that operate in the adjacent realms of toys and games, began with the 1999 release of LEGO Racers on N64. At least one LEGO game has been released on a Nintendo platform nearly every year since, and multiple Nintendo-themed LEGO sets have been released each year since they debuted in 2020.

The LEGO-Nintendo synergy has persisted through the Switch era, and with the Switch 2 now out in the wild, we’re looking back on the legacy of LEGO on the Switch.

How Many LEGO Games Are Playable on Nintendo Switch 2?

As of 2026, 19 LEGO games have been released on Switch consoles, from LEGO Undercover City in 2017 to the most recent game, LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, in 2026. Of the 20 games, nine are LEGO originals and 11 are licensed collaborations with other intellectual properties.

Every LEGO Game on Switch and Switch 2 (Ordered by Release Date)

LEGO City Undercover (2017)

In April 2017, one month after the console’s launch, the series’ first game to hit the Switch was LEGO City Undercover, which is an original LEGO game originally released for Wii U in 2013. It’s based on the LEGO City series of themed building sets and tells the tale of an undercover police officer tracking an escaped prisoner.

LEGO Worlds (2017)

LEGO Worlds is another original game released on the Switch in 2017. Worlds is the most authentically LEGO game available on Switch; it steps out of the series’ usual action-adventure genre into the world of sandbox games (think Minecraft), allowing you to build structures and environments brick by brick.

The LEGO Ninjago Movie Video Game (2017)

The LEGO Ninjago Movie Video Game is, as its name makes clear, an adaptation of The LEGO Ninjago Movie. The game and movie, both based on LEGO’s own Ninjago line, were released in the U.S. on September 22, 2017. The action-adventure game features eight locations and several playable characters from the movie.

LEGO Marvel Super Heroes 2 (2017)

LEGO Marvel Super Heroes draws characters and locations from Marvel movies and comics alike, with a massive roster of characters that (probably) includes every Marvel hero and villain you can think of. It’s a direct sequel to LEGO Marvel Super Heroes that ultimately pits you against the time-travelling villain Kang the Conqueror.

The first game is also available on the Switch, though you’ll find it further down this list – it wasn’t ported until 2021.

LEGO The Incredibles (2018)

Another LEGO-Disney collaboration, LEGO The Incredibles combines story beats from both movies, the 2004 original and 2018 sequel. The game was released alongside The Incredibles 2 in June 2018. It features over 100 playable characters, including all five members of the Parr family. This game is one of many Disney games currently available on the Switch in 2025.

LEGO DC Super-Villains (2018)

LEGO DC Super-Villains is a LEGO Batman spinoff focused on a collection of villains from the deep history of DC Comics, including The Joker and Lex Luthor. The villains must navigate the internal threat of personality conflict while pursuing the mysterious Justice Syndicate. It’s notably the first LEGO game to center its story around a player-created character.

LEGO Harry Potter Collection (2018)

The LEGO Harry Potter Collection is a compilation of two games: LEGO Harry Potter Years 1-4 and LEGO Harry Potter Years 5-7. The collection includes the complete LEGO Harry Potter experience, pulling characters, stories, and activities from all seven books and eight movies. This collaboration goes hand-in-hand with the many LEGO Harry Potter sets that have released over the last few years.

The LEGO Movie 2 Videogame (2019)

The LEGO Movie 2 Videogame is a movie tie-in that was largely knocked for its lack of originality and innovation. The game blends elements of traditional action-adventure LEGO games with the building elements introduced in LEGO Worlds.

LEGO Jurassic World (2019)

Originally released alongside the movie in 2015, LEGO Jurassic World came to Switch four years later in 2019. It features a 20-level campaign with five levels from each movie that had been released up until that point in time (Jurassic Park 1-3 and Jurassic World). In addition to characters from the Jurassic World movies, you can unlock playable versions of the franchise’s primary directors, Steven Spielberg and Colin Trevorrow.

LEGO Builder’s Journey (2021)

LEGO Builder’s Journey came to Switch in 2021 after debuting on Apple Arcade in 2019. While most LEGO games incorporate puzzle-solving, Builder’s Journey is all puzzles, all the time. It’s a beautifully designed game that tells its father-son story one geometric puzzle at a time.

LEGO Marvel Superheroes (2021)

First released in 2013, LEGO Marvel Superheroes didn’t come to Switch until 2021. It tells an original story with several of Marvel’s most recognizable heroes – Spider-Man, Iron Man, Hulk, Wolverine, Captain America, and others – teaming up to foil the apocalyptic plans of Doctor Doom and Loki.

LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga (2022)

The definitive LEGO Star Wars experience, The Skywalker Saga features reimagined scenes from all nine Skywalker movies: the original trilogy, prequel trilogy, and sequel trilogy. Within this sprawling collection are over 300 playable characters, 23 planets, and 100 vehicles. Compared to past LEGO games, The Skywalker Saga moves you closer to the action by shifting the camera from a zoomed-out third-person perspective to a tighter over-the-shoulder view. Considering the sheer amount of Star Wars LEGO sets out there, it's no surprise this made for one of the best Star Wars games of all time.

LEGO Brawls (2022)

LEGO Brawls is the worst-reviewed game on this list, based on Metascore (46). It’s an accessible, Smash Bros.-inspired fighting game originally released for Apple Arcade in 2019. Brawls features well over 100 minifigures/fighters from over 10 LEGO sets, including Ninjago and Jurassic World.

LEGO Bricktales (2022)

LEGO Bricktales is an original, puzzle-based adventure similar to LEGO Builder’s Journey, though on a larger scale. The game takes you to dioramas set in jungles, deserts, cities, medieval castles, and tropical islands. Bricktales was made by ClockStone Studio, the developer best known for its Bridge Constructor series.

LEGO 2K Drive (2023)

LEGO 2K Drive, from prolific sports game developer Visual Concepts, is a racing game set in the open world of Bricklandia. 2K Drive is a robust racing game that features street, off-road, and water races; story, single race, tournament, minigame, and free-roam modes; and a custom car-builder that our review called “excellent.”

LEGO Fortnite (2023)

LEGO Fortnite is a collection of LEGO-themed games housed within Fortnite. Epic Games and the LEGO Group have created several LEGO Fornite experiences since the collaboration was launched in late 2023. Among the current ways to play are a survival-crafting game called Odyssey, an online social RPG called Brick Life, and a level designer called LEGO Islands.

LEGO Horizon Adventures (2024)

LEGO Horizon Adventures was a collaboration between PlayStation’s Guerrilla Games and English support studio Studio Gobo. It’s a retelling of Horizon Zero Dawn, simplified and sanitized for a wider audience, that leans into the combat and platforming mechanics of LEGO action games before it.

LEGO Voyagers (2025)

LEGO Voyagers is a two-player co-op adventure that's short and sweet. In our 8 out of 10 review, IGN praised its meorable puzzle games and fantasticly presented world. It doesn't have the same level of depth as co-op games like Split Fiction, or It Takes Two, but it's a fun game you can play together with someone.

LEGO Party (2025)

The second LEGO game we got in 2025, LEGO Party is, as you might guess, a party game along the lines of Mario Party. IGN's 8/10 review describes it as "Creative, colourful, and a consistent crack up... purpose-built to turn any boring old night into a block party filled with belly laughs." It feaures 60 minigames across LEGO sets from the Ninjago, Pirates, and Space themes. You can also customize your own minifigure and tackle Challenge Zones with up to three friends.

LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight (2026)

We have officially entered the Switch 2 era, and this release happens to only be playable on the newer Nintendo console (as well as PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PS5). If you've seen any gameplay, you'll quickly understand why.

In the words of our reviewer, Simon Cardy, LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is a "lovingly made, often hilarious take on both Batman’s movie and video game history alike," with a particularly impressive take on an open-world Gotham. Unsurprisingly, the game was accompanied by a new spread of LEGO Batman sets.

Upcoming LEGO Games on Switch 2

Paradox Interactive just announced LEGO Skylines at gamescom 2026. The game pretty much looks like a LEGO version of the studio's iconic Cities: Skylines city-building game, which sounds pretty freakin' awesome. There's no word on a release date yet, but we do know the game will be launching on Xbox Series X|S, PS5, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.

Otherwise, there continues to be an endless list of upcoming LEGO sets. A series of live-action LEGO movies are theoretically in development, while most existing LEGO movies are available to stream online.

Jordan covers games, shows, and movies as a freelance writer for IGN.

This is an IGN opinion piece from Ryan McCaffrey, who worked at Official Xbox Magazine from 2002-2012 during the original Xbox and Xbox 360 era before joining IGN, where he remains “the Xbox guy.” In the run-up to Xbox’s 25th anniversary, he’ll be sharing his memories from the platform’s first quarter-century.

I imagine the Xbox stories I’ve been sharing on IGN recently in the run-up to the brand’s 25th anniversary probably seem a little ridiculous or even a bit crazy now – like how I got to be one of the first people to ever play through Halo 2 while playing in a storage closet at Bungie – but I promise you, it was all pretty normal back then. Today I have another one of those stories for you, and it’s one of my favorite gaming memories of all time. It’s about The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

If you were a gamer back when the Xbox 360 first came out, you’ll remember how big a deal it was that the Xbox 360 was the first console of the “HD Era,” as the entire history of video games up to that point (at least on the console side – respect to my fellow PC gamers who’d been 1024x768’ing it for years by then). Finally we were moving from 640x480 (interlaced, to boot) to 1280x720. It sounds quaint now, but it was a huge leap at the time. The 360 had gotten off to a fast start in November of 2005 thanks to the likes of Call of Duty 2, Project Gotham Racing 3, and then a couple months later, the jaw-dropping Fight Night Round 3. But there was one game we were all anticipating far more than any other in the 360’s first months: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It was supposed to be a day-one launch title for the new Xbox, but it got delayed.

I was personally and professionally so excited for this game, as it seemed like my ultimate medieval fantasy RPG come to life. And so I’d spearheaded Official Xbox Magazine’s coverage throughout 2005; I think I made at least two trips out to Bethesda Game Studios in Maryland that year as excitement for the game and the console built. The studio had already won a lot of console-gamer fans through its 2002 original Xbox port of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, but this time, Oblivion was readied as a day-one Xbox 360 game, simultaneous to its PC launch. And what I had seen on those trips – translated into feature stories in OXM – had only fueled my hype even more. The stunning graphics, the incredible music, the “living” NPCs who had daily routines they’d go through whether you were around or not – it all felt like it was coalescing into something truly special.

So when it finally came time to review Oblivion, OXM was once again able to secure the exclusive review. Combined with the lead times necessitated by magazine publishing schedules, it meant that I found myself back at Bethesda in January of 2006 to review Oblivion, which shipped in March. Everyone knew it’d be a big game – Morrowind most certainly was – and so the plan was to spend four days at Bethesda and play as much as I possibly could. When I arrived at the studio, I was brought down to the basement floor, I said hello (again) to Todd Howard, and then I was escorted into a glass-walled conference room. There I had a giant TV at one end of the room, my chair and an Xbox 360 dev kit at the other end of the room, and a controller on the table. And then everyone else left.

My mission was to get as many hours under my belt as I could before heading home to write the review for the magazine. My hotel was literally next door to Bethesda’s office, so I wouldn’t even have to spend time getting to and from the studio. Food was ordered in for me, and I took short breaks and ate right in the conference room. It was just me and the archer/thief I’d created for 44 hours over four days. Yes, I spent roughly 11 hours per day living in Cyrodiil without having to think about anything else: no other work, no other responsibilities. It was amazing, and one of the best gaming experiences of my life.

I explored, I fought, I snuck, I stole, I joined the Dark Brotherhood, I closed a whole bunch of Oblivion Gates, and yes, I made sure to complete the main story questline. I even found, tamed, and rode a unicorn in the forest. The worst part of all of this was twofold: one, having to stop. And two, having to start over once the final retail copies of the game arrived. But as a testament to how incredible that game was (and thankfully still is, thanks to last year’s great remaster), I put another 125-plus hours into it at home in March, soaking in every DLC and expansion that dropped after launch. (I gave Oblivion a 9.5 out of 10 in OXM, if you’re curious.)

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was arguably the defining moment of the first months of the HD Era and a true killer app for the Xbox 360 – you had to buy the console so you wouldn’t miss out on this game. And if you’ve made it this far, I’ll bet you’ve got lots of great memories of this one too. Here’s hoping that The Elder Scrolls 6 can recapture at least some of that magic.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, and a co-host of Next-Gen Console Watch. He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.

This is an IGN opinion piece from Charlie Lopresto, who believes that love can bloom, even on a battlefield. He first encountered Metal Gear Solid on a demo disc from Pizza Hut and has since completed three hundred missions in VR– the kind that’s indistinguishable from the real thing.

Like Old Snake, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is a fossil. A genetic dead-end of gaming evolution, the unhinged and overflowing masterpiece that barely left a mark on the artform. Despite its commercial and critical success, MGS4 is rarely regarded as top tier Metal Gear. But is that actually fair?

Trapped on dead console hardware for the better part of its hard life, thanks to the new Master Collection Vol. 2 it’s finally possible for everyone to experience MGS4, from series diehards who first fired it up in 2008 to people completely new to Metal Gear who have absolutely no idea what they’re in for.

All of them will reckon with the many, many questions MGS4 brings to mind, like: Will we ever see a game like this again? Why did we stop talking about it? And, perhaps most importantly: MGS4 is really good, isn't it?

“The Lightning in That Rain”

Hideo Kojima did not want to make Metal Gear Solid 4. He publicly declared his desire to end the franchise as early as MGS 2, then proclaimed that he was finished with the saga after Snake Eater. Kojima’s words were weary but his deeds said otherwise. He wasn’t really ready to move on– both of those games ooze with a sense of momentum and life.

Guns of the Patriots feels different. There’s a gloomy weight to the game, like a funeral – the raucous kind where friends, grudges, and flames gather to settle scores, awkwardly hook up, and celebrate the end.

Prior to MGS4, we’d last seen Solid Snake in 2001, when he dropped a prophetic monologue and vanished into the streets of lower Manhattan shortly after the former President of the United States crashed into the city with a giant sci-fi submarine. As situations go, it’s certainly one that begs for some followup, and after years of fans demanding the return of the Legendary Mercenary, Kojima obliged in trademark trolling fashion.

You don’t get the cocky, mech-smashing super soldier who slays Tengu by the dozen with a metafictional bandana. Kojima, who reportedly received death threats over his reluctance to move the story forward with MGS4, instead delivers a feeble, actively decomposing relic. Old Snake grunts, screams, coughs and gags wetly as he crawls in agony through his final mission, all for the privilege of being allowed to die before his poisoned blood wipes out humanity. Old Snake was punished before Punished was cool.

It’s a trope we’ve seen a lot lately: the beloved hero of a bygone age, bitter, broken down, and humbled, all in service of passing the torch to a spunky new recruit before the credits roll. But there is no Rey to don the cardboard box here, no Adonis Creed, no Robin, nor any kind of chipper next-gen protagonist queued to continue Snake’s legacy by selling some video games. Nearly everyone in Metal Gear Solid 4 is old, dead, or extremely married by the end of the story, a bittersweet and beautifully conclusive eulogy to a deeply heroic and thoroughly decrepit old man who reeks of cigarettes.

Modern media is designed to protect itself, to keep mythology marketable and leave endings open for future exploitation. Kojima does the exact opposite with MGS4, performing peaceful euthanasia on his life’s work to that point. It’s a brave move delivered with a lot of love and earnestness, and anyone upset at geriatric Snake were too busy feasting on a buffet of fanservice to stay mad for long.

Rarely do sprawling stories wrap up as neatly as Metal Gear Solid’s, even if “neatly” here means bursting at the seams and slightly slapdash. Kojima didn’t have a decades-long master plan when he made Metal Gear for the MSX in 1987, but managed to B.S. his way into satisfying answers for nearly everything. It’s an ambitious, messy, and sincere sendoff to Snake and the series. There’s really nowhere else to go from here.

Which brings us to the elephant in the room, dangling precariously from a Fulton balloon over this discussion: Guns of the Patriots is not the last Metal Gear Solid game. Despite his protestations, Kojima had two more Metal Gears in him: the portable Peace Walker, a numbered entry in all but name, and the tragic MGS5. Both respect the brick wall he built at the end of the timeline and tread water safely in the past instead of pushing forward. Kojima decided to move the series horizontally instead, experimenting with tech and form until Konami kicked him out.

Kojima’s actual final chapter, when it came, was compromised and ignominious, a casualty of his ugly exit from Konami and a sour note on which to end. Guns of the Patriots was Kojima ending things on his own terms; a bombastic epic with a massive budget that bursts with supreme confidence and unfiltered honesty. It would be the last time he ever made a game like this.

“War Has Changed”

Guns of the Patriots, like every mainline Metal Gear game before it, is structured like a linear, cinematic action-adventure story. It’s almost quaint from a 2026 lens, when half the industry runs on open worlds and the other on live-service menuslop, but this was Kojima’s M.O. throughout the early part of his career.

And yet for something so committed to telling one continuous story in agonizing detail, MGS4 feels oddly episodic. Each of its five acts is practically a different genre. One minute you’re scooching across a battlefield, then next you’re skulking through the streets of Eastern Europe in a trenchcoat. Kojima drops us into warzones and weapons facilities across the globe, introduces new ideas, and moves past them just as quickly.

A much-hyped faction loyalty system stops mattering after Act 2, and the mechanic to manipulate enemy emotions isn’t really a factor until New Game Plus. There are a whopping 70 guns available for Snake that are largely superfluous, while the omnipresent Psyche meter quickly fades into the background outside of some perfectly-timed comedy. It’s like Kojima is cramming every single cockamamie “Metal Gear” idea he had left into the game as if it were his last chance, or so he hoped.

Kojima’s Hollywood aspirations run wild here, and while some of the sloggier cinematics are a chore, I’d sit through a thousand torturous mission briefings to relive MGS4’s queasy, white-knuckle fusions of story and mechanics, like the sicko mode split screen action setpieces and the tactile desperation of the microwave hallway.

The game’s linearity is a huge strength. We embody Old Snake through every second of his grueling ordeal. We wince with every injury and every brutal negging. Solid Snake was our stand-in from the moment he infiltrated Outer Heaven, detours aside, and we feel every moment of the long journey as he slugs it out with “Liquid” one last time. That sense of embodiment, being inside Snake, a part of him… you can’t get that from a mission select screen. But Kojima’s next and last games in his Metal Gear Solid saga would be built with these impersonal menus in mind.

Frustrated with the PS3’s limitations for his grand scale vision, Kojima went small instead. Also available in Master Collection Vol. 2, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker was originally built for the handheld Playstation Portable, so a sprawling linear opus was pretty much off the table without the luxury of blu-ray discs and Cell processors. Instead, he designed for the handheld system’s strengths: short, snackable stealth missions selected from a menu, perfect for a train ride or waiting room.

Previous Metal Gears relied on blockbuster storytelling to keep you coming back, but Peace Walker leans on moreish base-building, optional challenges, and RPG systems borrowed from Monster Hunter to keep you hooked. Seven years after Snake bluntslid across the Big Shell, grinding was back in Metal Gear, and this time it was here to stay.

Kojima is clearly fond of the results. He considers Peace Walker the fifth mainline MGS game, and thanks to rereleases it’s had far more staying power than the average PSP game. He liked the formula so much that he made it his default going forward: both MGS5 and the Death Stranding games run on the same skeleton, embracing timers and stats and judging your performance in isolated missions chosen from a list. At this rate we’ll probably be chasing S-ranks in OD.

It works beautifully for a handheld, and for a taciturn cipher like Sam Bridges, but it really doesn’t suit traditional Metal Gear Solid. MGS5 was free from the shackles of a 272p screen, but even with the full glory of the Fox Engine, the menu-driven mode of interaction keeps us at arms length from Snake.

The story becomes another checklist item, grinding through side ops until an actually important mission appears on the list. We’re watching from a more omniscient remove as Snake sizes up the stats of future subordinates and navigates a tech tree. For a series that loves to mess directly with the player and collapse the space between them and the character, losing that intimacy comes with a cost. MGS4 made Snake’s suffering feel like ours, and the series never approached that level of pathos again.

Being inside Old Snake’s head for dozens of hours is genuinely unpleasant at times, to the point it makes the game almost hard to revisit, and it’s one of several reasons why MGS4’s legacy is so quiet.

“Zero Becomes One”

It’s hard for a game to have an ongoing influence when nobody can play it. Metal Gear Solid 4 has been unavailable for years, buried alive on hardware that Sony hasn’t sold for nearly a decade. Countless classic titles are trapped on ancient tech, but it’s rare for a numbered entry in a massive, triple A series.

The PS3’s Cell Processor was notoriously miserable to develop for, with bizarre architecture far removed from industry standards that made porting anything off it a nightmare. It’s also why emulation, so vital to keeping commercially abandoned games alive, couldn’t save Old Snake either. Strides have been made recently, but MGS4 remains a genuine bear to run outside of its native hardware.

None of these technical woes were insurmountable, and neither were the super specific Sony references or the licensing entanglements from MGS4’s frankly ludicrous product placement. It just needed a publisher that cared enough to devote the resources to porting it and had the courage to get Uniqlo, Apple, and Playboy back to the negotiating table.

Konami was content to let the series languish for a long time as it explicitly abandoned video games for pachinko parlors. It only once really wrestled with following MGS4 in the timeline, in Platinum’s audacious spinoff Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. Otherwise, it didn’t matter to Konami if nobody could buy or play MGS4.

Thankfully, that’s changed. Konami’s prodigal return to video games has gone well enough so far, and now MGS4 is enjoying an immaculate rebirth, iPod and all. How will modern gamers receive it after so many years in the wilderness?

Guns of the Patriots is an aggressively unfriendly game by modern standards, and the cutscenes are completely out of control. A common Kojima criticism is that he’d rather make movies than games, but it’s hard to think of any film that’s nine hours long, built largely out of static codec calls, and features extended scenes of people drinking soda and smoking around little girls while weeping about nanomachines and infectious diseases. Whatever MGS4 is, it’s not a movie, and it’s certainly not made for newcomers.

MGS4 isn’t spoken of in the same breath as the first three games, and when it does come up it’s rarely for what it actually accomplished. And since almost nobody’s been able to play the game for so long, its reputation as an uncomfortable cutscene parade is all that remains. Opinion calcifies when there’s nothing around to contradict it.

That’s not to say nobody’s tried to pick up what MGS4 put down. Resident Evil Requiem almost feels like a tribute at times, a last ride for a long-suffering hero who makes a pilgrimage back to where his story started while dying from a sci-fi disease that makes him cough a lot. By the end, Leon is upgrading his weapons with counterfeit Drebin Points, dueling hand-to-hand with his longtime rival, and dragging himself inch by agonizing inch through a high-tech hallway.

Without spoiling where it lands, Requiem doesn’t have the nerve to go out on a limb like MGS4. Its tribute to Raccoon City sent us on a nostalgic trip through a place we’ve already walked through twice in HD, stopping far short of the wobbly PSX vertices in MGS4’s homage to Shadow Moses, another holy gaming space introduced in 1998. The ending stops short as well, a clean cut affair that leaves plenty of room for further adventures and profitable sequels.

Triple-A gaming didn’t go in an MGS4 direction in the intervening years. Budgets are too big and bosses too demanding to allow a freakazoid like Kojima off the leash again– unless you’re the man himself, of course. But Kojima only gets away with that because he had the power to leave the system that made MGS4 possible. Everyone else is still answering to a spreadsheet and, understandably, gunshy about unfettered visionaries.

Modern gaming’s play-it-safe instincts could do wonders for MGS4’s reputation. George Lucas and his Star Wars prequels suffered a similar rap over the years, dismissed as the bloated self-indulgent work of an auteur no one could rein in. But a decade of focus-tested corpo Star Wars sequels has sparked a genuine re-evaluation of the much-maligned Episodes I, 2, and 3, and now that it’s available again, MGS4 deserves the same treatment. Both the prequels and MGS4 are messy, overstuffed, and often embarrassing, but they are never once indifferent. Sincerity ages a lot better than caution.

Ultimately, everyone has to judge Metal Gear Solid 4 for themselves, to witness the grandiosity, endure the hour-plus uninterrupted cutscenes, and gaze hypnotically at Old Snake’s buttcheeks amidst a bombardment of jargon and lore. At least now you’ll get the chance to, and when you do finally sit with Kojima’s wayward masterpiece, you might like it more than you’d think.

Charlie "Moose" Lopresto graduated law school, passed the bar, and made a financially questionable decision to write about games and movies instead. Contributing to IGN since 2021, he collects solo board games and transforming robots.

This is an IGN opinion piece from Ryan McCaffrey, who worked at Official Xbox Magazine from 2002-2012 during the original Xbox and Xbox 360 era before joining IGN, where he remains “the Xbox guy.” In the run-up to Xbox’s 25th anniversary, he’ll be sharing his memories from the platform’s first quarter-century.

I love music but never had the patience or dedication to learn an instrument. And I sure as heck can’t sing. So when Guitar Hero came along – more specifically, when it came to Xbox 360 in 2007 with Guitar Hero 2 – I and the rest of the Official Xbox Magazine staff I worked with at the time became obsessed with it. Fast-forward to some business drama and just a year and change later, the original creators of Guitar Hero had left the franchise with Activision and built something bigger and better with MTV and EA: Rock Band. It remains, to this day, the most unique and physically satisfying gaming experience I’ve ever had. It truly connected you to the music in a way that just listening to it by yourself can't do. And at OXM, we played it so much that we ended up pissing off our sister magazines in the building.

I remember when Rock Band was first demonstrated, though I don’t remember where. I just remember seeing a video of four people from the Harmonix development team – one on lead guitar, one on bass, one on drums, and one singing – playing “Wanted Dead or Alive” on a stage somewhere and looking like they were having the time of their lives. From that moment on, I couldn’t wait to try it. Something about the drums in particular spoke to me – perhaps because it might be the closest 1:1 to playing the real instrument. I finally got my chance at a preview event at EA’s campus, and it instantly became my favorite thing.

It only got “worse” when OXM finally got our Rock Band kit ahead of launch. We had to review it, after all, and magazines have long lead times, so it meant that we were lucky to get it in our possession a solid couple months before it actually came out. And while my name wasn’t on the review (we gave it a 9.5 back when we had a 20-point scale; IGN gave it a 9.4), all of us contributed to that review by volunteering to play so that our reviewer had as much of the full four-player experience as possible (we really sacrificed, I know… ;-)).

When Rock Band released and the rest of the world caught the fever too, our addiction deepened. We got more instruments (the original versions were, uh, shall we say, now known for their durability) and put stickers on them. We played every day. The weekly DLC song packs started flowing. And then someone had the bright idea to take our storage closet, which was full of old Xbox hardware and accessories, and turn it into a dedicated Rock Band room.

We ordered sound-deadening foam for the walls and a drum stool, put a flat-screen TV in there, and dragged in a spare set of 5.1 Dolby surround sound speakers with a beefy subwoofer. We changed the label on the outside of the door from “OXM Storage” to “Room of No Judgment,” because if you entered that room and picked up a guitar, microphone, or drum sticks, it wasn’t about being good. It was about having fun. And holy cow did we have fun. Too much fun, in fact, as our sister publication down the hall would constantly come into our office area and ask us to be quiet while they were on deadline with their magazine. I guess that sound-deadening foam wasn’t as effective as we thought.

We voted Rock Band as Official Xbox Magazine’s Game of the Year winner that year – beating out Halo 3, Mass Effect, BioShock, and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. And I don’t regret it for a moment. Rock Band was a truly unique multiplayer video game that somehow achieved its goal of conveying the camaraderie and unity of “making” music with other people. I remain sad to this day that the moment has passed and probably never coming back. For me it peaked with Rock Band 2, the addition of keyboards in Rock Band 3 didn’t quite hit as hard, and the comeback attempt years later on Xbox One in the form of Rock Band 4 was awesome, but it just wasn’t a monoculture event anymore. To that end, Rock Band was special in a way that’s hard to explain if you didn’t live through it. Like the greatest concert you’ve ever been to, you can’t just watch a recording of it on YouTube. You had to be there. But if you were, you knew.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, and a co-host of Next-Gen Console Watch. He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.

Decorated veteran game developer Harvey Smith (Dishonored series, original Deus Ex series), most recently of Arkane Austin – which Xbox shut down in 2024 following the failure of Redfall – has opened a new game development studio. Dubbed Black Pony Immersive, it will indeed focus on the "immersive sim" genre that Smith helped pioneer evolve through his work as co-creative director on Dishonored, creative director on Dishonored 2, and lead game designer on the original Deus Ex (which, not for nothing, this particular writer ranks as a top-10 game of all-time).

"My favorite gaming memories come from seeing players approach challenges with creativity, deep-diving into our world building," Smith said. "We try to reward players for their curiosity and exploration. At our new studio, we're building exactly the kind of single-player games we're most passionate about."

Smith is a disciple of immersive-sim legend Warren Spector, who just announced his retirement. "I worked closely with Warren for nine years, learning a lot," Smith told IGN. "We still go to lunch now and then. Recently, he gave me one of his guitars after we ate a bunch of Mexican food. My feelings for Warren are deep and complicated, but mostly I feel admiration and gratitude. For Richard Garriott too. So much good came of Origin. Places like Austin or Boston, or cities in Europe, experience flourishes now and then, as creative leaders get something going. A scene. The entire industry is deeply hurting right now, Austin included. I am just thrilled to be announcing Black Pony Immersive. Making another run at trying to create magic for players. Having the team we have, including Ricardo and people we worked with on Deus Ex, Dishonored, and Prey just feels like a dream. We are on fire for single-player, narrative-driven, first-person (highly hyphenated) immersive sims."

I asked about lessons learned from Arkane to hopefully help lead Black Pony to a better fate, and Smith said, "In my mind, that's a tricky, emotional question. I loved my time there with Raf, Ricardo, Ben, and everyone else. I worked at Arkane for 16 years. Part of the company is still around, in Lyon, where it started. During my years there, we went back and forth between Texas and France. The company released Dishonored, Prey, Dishonored 2, some great Dishonored DLC, Death of the Outsider, Mooncrash, and Deathloop. We worked on a few other projects too, including Redfall at the end. You say, 'a better fate.' But honestly imagine if, like Arkane, our new studio lasted 27+ years, and released at least 4-5 absolute bangers, on top of being a super fun, interesting place to work, a place that experienced what I can only describe as electric fan support. If that happens again, I will absolutely count myself as blessed. I would feel lucky in the extreme to experience that again. And I don't know of many places that get to that much joy and creative success. It's just so rare. Very hard to pull off."

I concluded by asking Smith if he felt a sense of responsibility to carry the torch for the immersive sim genre. "Always. Until I am dead," he said. "I'm playing the Killing Stone right now, a super clever deckbuilder on Steam. So I have some range as a player. That said, immersive sims are my favorite. I am hyped for any that come along. High hopes for Judas! Marvel's Blade! Raf's new game at Wolf-Eye! Gloomwood 1.0, Secret of Weepstone, Project Shadowglass, Peripeteia, Clockwork Revolution, Distant Shore Bretagne, the one with the giant Eastern European cop, and maybe even a new Bioshock game. More games than I actually have time to play."

Smith is joined at Black Pony Immersive by longtime Arkane Austin collaborator Ben Horne and Ricardo Bare as they build out their team, whose collective resume includes the likes of the aforementioned Deus Ex and Dishonored games along with Prey and Just Cause. They promise to reveal more about their first project soon.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, and a co-host of Next-Gen Console Watch. He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.

This is an IGN opinion piece from Ryan McCaffrey, who worked at Official Xbox Magazine from 2002-2012 during the original Xbox and Xbox 360 era before joining IGN, where he remains “the Xbox guy.” In the run-up to Xbox’s 25th anniversary, he’ll be sharing his memories from the platform’s first quarter-century.

Those of you who’ve been reading my stuff long enough may remember that when I reviewed Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, the third game in Ubisoft’s stellar Tom Clancy stealth series, for Official Xbox Magazine, I awarded it 9.9 out of 10 (interestingly enough, IGN wrote the shortest news story ever about it back then). It was, at the time, the highest score the magazine had ever given. And it wasn’t even as high as I wanted to go. I actually tried to give it a full 10, but our editor-in-chief talked me down. But even at .1 of a point lower, Sam Fisher still got a higher score than Master Chief – Halo: Combat Evolved got a 9.6 in one of the magazine’s very first issues in 2001, and Halo 2 got a 9.7 in 2004.

I stand by that incredibly high score to this day. Chaos Theory was – and is – that good. It’s essentially three 10 out of 10 games in one; more on that later.

But first, let’s rewind to some months before Chaos Theory’s March 2005 release on the original Xbox. The Splinter Cell series was no longer an Xbox exclusive, but Chaos Theory was, technically speaking, vastly superior on Xbox when compared to its PS2 and GameCube counterparts. That was the first sign that this would be a must-play for Xbox owners.

When you’ve been playing games long enough, whether as a gamer or games media writer, you eventually develop what I refer to as a “Spidey Sense” – meaning, you usually get a pretty good sense for how good a game is after just a short time with it. And the first time I played Chaos Theory at a preview appointment, that Spidey Sense tingled. “I think this one might be really special,” I thought to myself. It wasn’t a surprise then or now, as Chaos Theory was being built by Ubisoft Montreal, then one of the premier development studios in the world, and the makers of the original Splinter Cell (Ubisoft Shanghai handled the first sequel, Pandora Tomorrow, and the game after Chaos Theory, Double Agent – both a tier below Montreal’s work). That the Montreal crew was cooking wasn’t a surprise in and of itself, but just how incredible a game they’d made wouldn’t be revealed until I sat down to review the finished product.

Back to that “three 10 out of 10s in one” comment from earlier: you all know about the single-player campaign. It featured many incredible, memorable missions, from the opening Lighthouse to the open-ended Bank, to the “anti-ninja” floors in Hokkaido, to the steamy Japanese bathhouse. You could play Sam Fisher as a sadistic serial killer who electrocuted his victims with Sticky Shockers before executing them with his silenced pistol, or you could do the opposite and attempt full ghost runs where you don’t kill a soul, leaving only a trail of unconscious-but-otherwise-very-much-alive bad guys in your wake. And the settings themselves were open-ended; it wasn’t a full open-world experience as we know it today, but there were almost always multiple ways in and out of each space and every encounter was a multiple-choice problem.

I could go on, but let’s talk about the PvP multiplayer for a moment, which provides the next 10/10 game of the package. Spies vs. Mercs returned after its debut in Pandora Tomorrow, and continued to prove itself as one of the most unique and innovative multiplayer games of not just 2005, but all time. Playing from a third-person perspective, Spies were equipped with nonlethal weapons and could only kill by sneaking up behind the fully armed Mercs (who played with more limited vision thanks to their first-person camera). Proximity chat added depth – Spies could taunt Mercs, distracting them to enable that sneaking-up-behind moment, and then proceed to snap their necks. Guns vs. gadgets, brains vs. brawn. It was truly brilliant.

And then, finally, there was the co-op campaign. This was not simply the main campaign played with a buddy, but a completely separate story in which you and a friend played as Shadownet spies infiltrating various locations. You’d work together, such as going back to back to climb up an elevator shaft, or one person running at the other, who’d throw them into bad guys like a human missile. There were four of these missions in the box, and two more were added as free DLC after launch. This arguably paved the way for the dedicated co-op games we know and love today.

Oh, and all of it was powered by some of the most incredible dynamic lighting we’d ever seen in a game at that point, a vital piece of Splinter Cell’s puzzle, given that you could take out lights with your gadgets or silenced pistol to keep Sam Fisher – still voiced to sardonic perfection by the inimitable Michael Ironside – hidden in the dark.

I continue to lament the absence of a new Splinter Cell game in our lives. The last proper entry in the series was from the tail end of the Xbox 360 generation. Supposedly the remake of the original is still in the works, but I’ll believe it when I see it. Until then, I’ll remain grateful for Chaos Theory, the best original Xbox game ever and one of the best stealth games ever made. It doesn’t pack the graphical punch it did 20 years ago, but the gameplay holds up if you’re tempted to give it a try today.

Check out the other notable Xbox games I've looked back on in celebration of the brand's 25th anniversary:

• Mass Effect 1
• Inside
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
• Fight Night Round 3
• Batman: Arkham Asylum

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, and a co-host of Next-Gen Console Watch. He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.

A former Naughty Dog developer has revealed that Uncharted: Drake's Fortune featured dynamic scaling difficulty in order to make the game longer.

In a new interview with FRVR, ex-Naughty Dog designer Benson Russell opened up about how Uncharted: Drake's Fortune had a somewhat difficult and complicated development process. For instance, he noted that the team designed environments without accounting for how combat would operate within them and had to find ways to make it work. However, their biggest challenge was that, after everything was set in place, the game was very short.

Russell joked that there was no way they could sell a five-hour-long game with no multiplayer for $60, so they came up with a strategic solution: dynamic difficulty. The game's difficulty scales, and it's partially to slow the player down and extend their overall playtime.

“We ended up putting a dynamic difficulty system in, but its key thing was to slow the player down if they were too good," he said. "That’s one of the big ones. That’s one of reasons why Uncharted 1 gets so hard. If you’re doing really good for the difficulty level you have it set on — it’s all time-based! We would do a bunch of focus tests and we would grab the average times per encounter… if you beat a combat encounter faster than the average that we had, we would start cranking the difficulty.”

The dynamic difficulty system was featured in all three of the original Uncharted games, but it was tuned more carefully to match your skill level rather than to control the pacing of the game itself. So, if you ever felt like the difficulty dramatically spiked in the first Uncharted title, you're not crazy. Naughty Dog simply thought you were playing the game too fast and put some obstacles in your way to slow you down.

Russell also recently spoke about how he is uninterested in a remake of the first Uncharted game. He believes the games largely hold up and that a remake would require Naughty Dog to make big changes that risk altering what fans love about them. Whether a remake of the first game ever happens remains to be seen, but it wouldn't be shocking, given studios are mining their old titles for new releases.

Cade Onder is a freelancer for IGN's news team. He covers all things entertainment, including gaming, film, and more. You can find him on Twitter @Cade_Onder.

Video game developer legend Warren Spector has announced his retirement from video game development.

The 70-year-old founding father of the immersive sim genre announced his retirement in a post on LinkedIn, saying he felt he had done what he set out to do over the course of his glittering career. He now plans to write a book or two and do some lecturing or consulting.

Spector announced his retirement admitting there are still a few games he’d like to make, but said the video game business had changed and he doesn’t find it fun anymore. He also left the door open to a return to development at some point in the future.

Here’s Spector’s statement in full:

While Spector is perhaps best known for his work on Deus Ex and Thief at Ion Storm, he also founded Junction Point Studios, developer of Disney’s Epic Mickey games. Spector retires as chief creative officer of OtherSide Entertainment, developer of a spiritual successor to Looking Glass's Ultima Underworld series called Underworld Ascendant. Spector's latest game, Thick as Thieves, failed to find an audience, and OtherSide suffered a round of layoffs.

Photo by Gabe Ginsberg/FilmMagic.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

This is an IGN opinion piece from Ryan McCaffrey, who worked at Official Xbox Magazine from 2002-2012 during the original Xbox and Xbox 360 era before joining IGN, where he remains “the Xbox guy.” In the run-up to Xbox’s 25th anniversary, he’ll be sharing his memories from the platform’s first quarter-century.

Anyone old enough to remember the Xbox 360’s earliest days, the ones before Mass Effect finally came out in November of 2007, will recall that BioWare’s epic space opera didn’t just come out of nowhere. It had been hugely anticipated and hyped up a whole lot… and I’m part of the reason why.

I worked at Official Xbox Magazine at the time, and to say we were excited for this RPG would be an understatement. This was a big, big deal. BioWare was, at the time, on a generational run, and Microsoft had signed them to an exclusive deal. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire had already launched as Xbox exclusives, and the studio would go on to create the first two Mass Effect games as 360 exclusives before EA bought it and made it a multiplatform developer. In baseball terms, this was like the Arizona Diamondbacks, as a fledgling expansion team, signing Randy Johnson in 1999 and then watching him go out and promptly win four straight Cy Young Awards and a World Series.

As we approached the mid-point of that four-game exclusive run, BioWare had begun to promise the moon with Mass Effect. It teased a trilogy in which your story choices and progress would carry over from one game to the next and ultimately influence the outcome of the entire story. Not only that, Mass Effect was going to include a serious tech upgrade over BioWare’s previous games, utilizing the stunning Unreal Engine 3 to power its world and characters.

I didn’t get to review Mass Effect at OXM – Fall 2007 for the Xbox 360 was arguably the greatest three-month stretch in gaming history, which meant everyone at OXM was incredibly busy (I’d been assigned to review Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare). The honor went to my colleague, Paul Curthoys, who gave it a well-deserved 10 out of 10 – in-line with IGN’s own 9.4.

But while I didn’t pen the review, I sure as heck played it. And although I know most people hail Mass Effect 2 as the best in the series, I have always been and will always be a defender of the first game. While yes, its combat was clunkier than the more polished third-person shooting that the sequels brought, for me, the original game’s story is head-and-shoulders above anything in the subsequent games. Shepard’s journey to becoming a Spectre. Meeting classic companions like Wrex and Garrus for the first time and building your relationship with them through your choices (I 100% chose Ashley over Kaidan, how about you?). Exploring the vastness of the Citadel, which was supposed to be this massive hub of the galaxy where alien races from across the galaxy congregated – Mass Effect 1 succeeded in convincing me of that, whereas in Mass Effect 2, the Citadel was reduced to a tiny two-level corridor.

Remember the Elcor? Remember all of the sidequests you could take on? The Citadel was wondrous, and it wasn’t even the most memorable thing about my Mass Effect adventure. That would be the plot twist. Yup, BioWare got me again! I loved where the story went, and Saren was a great villain.

Sure, the framerate struggled to hit 30fps on the Xbox 360, and the elevator rides took forever, but the gameplay and story and world and characters were so damn good in Mass Effect that its technical limitations just didn’t matter. It really was the space opera BioWare had promised. It very clearly could not have been achieved on the previous-generation Xbox. It was genuinely amazing, and it took us on a four-plus-year-ride (Mass Effect 3 shipped in March of 2012 and concluded Shepard’s story) unlike anything we’d ever experienced in gaming before.

Those of you who were there at the time probably remember how awesome your first moments with Mass Effect were, and I hope a new generation gets a chance to experience some version of that with the untitled Mass Effect 5 – even if I’m skeptical that EA’s new venture-capital owners will let BioWare see a single-player game with minimal post-release monetization through to the finish line, especially after it’s already been in development for so long. I hope I’m wrong.

But even if the new Mass Effect never makes it, I’m grateful for the original. It is easily one of the best and most significant Xbox exclusives ever. Whatever Microsoft paid for BioWare’s exclusivity back then, it was worth every cent.

Check out the other notable Xbox games I've looked back on in celebration of the brand's 25th anniversary:

• Inside
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
• Fight Night Round 3
• Batman: Arkham Asylum

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, and a co-host of Next-Gen Console Watch. He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.

Marvel star Simu Liu has offered a positive update on his long-in-development Sleeping Dogs movie adaptation, saying the film has "a REAL path forward" as discussions with game publisher Square Enix continue.

The Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings actor offered a treat to patient fans when asked about the project's status on X/Twitter. It's been some time since we heard where Sleeping Dogs was at, but don't worry, Liu said it is still very much in the works.

"Okay, here it is," he replied to a fan asking for an update. "We’re moving along really well, we have a director, and a production company, and a REAL path forward."

okay, here it is. we’re moving along really well, we have a director, and a production company, and a REAL path forward.

we’re just in the dealmaking process with the game studio rn (which is a total fan moment for me bc i love SquareEnix). your support is fuelling us all! https://t.co/1ufLYZab0E

— Simu Liu (@SimuLiu) August 16, 2026

Liu quickly stepped in to announce he had taken the reins to develop a movie based on Square Enix and United Front Games' Grand Theft Auto-inspired crime drama after Donnie Yen confirmed his take had been canned in early 2025. Although the nature of his involvement was initially kept a mystery, IGN reported that a Sleeping Dogs movie was, in fact, in development, with Liu set to produce and star as a live-action version of main character Wei Shen.

The star's new update also mentions a director, which was confirmed to be Nobody 2 and Killers filmmaker Timo Tjahjanto late last year. Video game adaptation veteran studio Story Kitchen is also in the mix, and in October 2025, Liu announced that the Sleeping Dogs script draft was completed.

Although things are moving slowly, they are absolutely still moving. Liu and the rest of the Sleeping Dogs team now need to work with Square Enix if they want to get the ball rolling toward an eventual release.

"We’re just in the dealmaking process with the game studio [right now] (which is a total fan moment for me [because] I love Square Enix)," he added. "Your support is fueling us all!"

"Set in a vibrant, contemporary, neon-infused neo-noir Hong Kong," an official description on the Story Kitchen website says. "WEI SHEN is an undercover cop torn between his duty as an officer of the law and, separately, his loyalty to a family of violent Triads that he’s trying to infiltrate, many of whom he grew up with on the streets."

The Sleeping Dogs movie currently has no firm release date or window. Liu has plenty to keep him busy in the meantime, as he's set to return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Avengers: Doomsday this December. He's also still pushing to make Shang-Chi 2 happen. Until we learn more, you can read IGN's review of the 2012 game to find out why we thought it deserved an 8.5/10.

Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He's best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).

Maybe it’s the excitement of knowing we’re about to see a whole load of GTA 6 soon, or maybe it was just another weekend where it felt too hot to move, but I decided to boot up Grand Theft Auto 4 for the first time in 18 years. This may not surprise many of you, but I’m here to tell you that it’s still very fun. Niko still rules. I love the lived-in feel of Liberty City. I even really enjoy the driving — somewhat controversial, I know. What I’m trying to say is: GTA 4 is still good, innit.

IGN gave GTA 4 a 10 way back in the day (I didn’t review it; I was still in school at the time), and, while I may not agree with it being a full-fledged masterpiece, there’s still plenty to admire. I’m not going to give it a full re-appraisal here; that’s what my colleague Luke Reilly will be doing when he gets round to it on our GTA legacy review series. I’m just here to let you know it still has the juice.

I won’t lie, though, the first thing I noticed when booting GTA 4 up was a sign of just how far we’ve come since Rockstar’s first hi-def city. The draw distance is really poor, at least on the original Xbox 360 version. Really, it was as if someone had stolen my glasses, proceeded to rub mud into my eyes, and then asked me to look directly into the sun.

When things do come into focus, though, it becomes clear just how much effort Rockstar put into this version of Liberty City’s character. Technical limitations didn’t prevent some first-class world-building here, especially the really grimy atmosphere that coats the opening areas of this New York proxy. Niko’s first apartment is suitably cramped for the start of this American dream story — the tape barely holding the lad's mag posters to the wall, each bikini model sporting more fold lines than tan lines. It’s a classy(?) touch.

The slapdash feeling continues when you step outside and into Roman’s taxi, with its rear bumper clinging on for dear life as you push the accelerator. The handling of vehicles in GTA 4 has been a topic of heated conversation since it first came out, but I have to admit, I kinda like it. There’s a looseness in how you corner that adds unexpected thrills to chases. Yes, it does make some roads feel like ice has been layered over the top of the asphalt, a feeling only enhanced by cars that feel heavy to the point of wondering if someone has lumped a pallet of bricks in the trunk as a prank, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t prefer it to what would come five years later. There’s no denying that you feel far more in control of a car in GTA 5, but I miss the danger of its predecessor’s driving. I’d love GTA 6 to find a balance between the two.

After its set up all the series basics, one of the first things GTA 4 introduces is its relationship system, which can involve both romantic and platonic bonds. It’s surprisingly deeper than I remember, and actually a pretty good reflection of what it can feel like to move to a big city where you know almost no one. That authentic feeling even forms the basis of Niko’s first date with Michelle, another newcomer to Liberty City.

The system, while often ridiculed for being a non-stop barrage of phone calls from your bowling-obsessed cousin, really rewards you for spending time with other characters. Whether it be unlocking weapons or helicopters by building these bonds, or just enjoying the activities you can do as a pair, there’s plenty of interesting ideas here and fun things to do. You can even go to see a Ricky Gervais stand-up show — something you might have actually considered doing with some enthusiasm in 2008. It was a different time.

Of course, the first of these activities you partake in is bowling, albeit not with your cousin Roman, and I did laugh when I saw the two pins and ball of the alley’s neon sign arranged in a certain way to resemble a part of the human anatomy. I really am still the same teenager that first played this game 18 years ago. It really is these small touches to Rockstar’s world that make the whole, though, and GTA 4’s ability to blend that audaciousness with the somewhat serious is partially what has enabled it to stand the test of time.

Hey, maybe its mission design does leave quite a bit to be desired — as, I’d argue, is the case with every GTA up until the most recent entry. But knowing that the much-lauded Three Leaf Clover is coming up at some point in the near future is admittedly exciting, even if the lustre of its cinematic bank robbery may have dulled over the years since launch. I’m looking forward to revisiting the level that set the series on a new trajectory for the first time in many, many years, and seeing how much of the sequel’s heist DNA I can see within it.

The thing that stood out most on this trip back to Liberty City was, of course, Niko Bellic. He’s at the centre of everything that makes GTA 4 as good as it is. I’m all for the puerile humour of these games, as seen above when it comes to my chortling at a glowing cock and balls, but I do think Rockstar is at its best when there’s a foundation of sincerity holding it all up. Red Dead Redemption 2 is my favourite game ever, and it's Arthur’s story and the lives of his companions that make it so special. Niko’s tale is the only other Rockstar game to take on a similar tone, and I found myself resonating with him even more this time around. Perhaps the realisation of chasing a dream that may never fully come to fruition makes me see it differently than I did at 16. But let’s not dwell on that too much.

Even if Grand Theft Auto 5 is my favourite of the series overall due to blockbuster ambition and execution of its world and missions, 4 is still the best GTA story told to date. Niko is still the most compelling protagonist. Whereas Franklin, Michael, and Trevor may all be very fun hangs, they are presented more as caricatures rather than full renderings of the human experience. And so it will be interesting to see what sort of tone GTA 6 takes, especially considering it will be Rockstar’s follow-up to Red Dead Redemption 2. Anyway, that’s for another day — November 19, to be exact — leaving plenty of time to finish Niko’s story again in the meantime. I’ll have to tear myself away from bowling strikes while R.E.M. plays on the tinny alley speakers first, though. I’m a man of simple pleasures.

As the world continues to heat up and I’m edging closer to my impending middle-aged years, I’ll likely start looking back to simpler times when playing good games and turning up to class on time were the only things on my calendar. I've already revisted Burnout Revenge, but if you fancy more ramblings like this, let me know. I already feel the likes of Fable 3, Max Payne 3, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution calling to me from my shelf.

Games are good, innit.

Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.

The original Toy Story 3 video game will soon be delisted from the digital Xbox store ahead of the launch of its new remaster in October.

The store page for 2010's unlikely classic has recently been updated with messaging confirming it will be pulled starting September 29, 2026, as shared by TrueAchievements. It means the Pixar video game will no longer be available for purchase at its $9.99 price tag on Xbox One and Xbox Series X | S after that date, though those who already own the game will still be able to play it.

You can probably guess why Toy Story 3 is being delisted; a remaster is right around the corner. Come October 15, a little more than two weeks after the original is delisted, Atari and Digital Eclipse will release Toy Story 3: Complete Edition.

The remaster is said to bring the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3-era title to modern platforms with upgraded graphics, resolution, and framerate, as well as some previously exclusive content. Judging by the fact that the delisting disclaimer also mentions the Complete Edition, it looks like Disney already wants players to turn their attention to the future.

"Starting on September 29, 2026, Toy Story 3 will no longer be available for purchase. Players who have purchased Toy Story 3 will still be able to access the game after this date," the full announcement on the Xbox store page said. "Toy Story 3: The Complete Edition, will be released on October 15th, 2026 on Xbox Series X|S, and will include all of the features in the original game with updated graphics and additional new features."

The original Toy Story 3 game was developed by Avalanche Software and published by Disney Interactive Studios, with Disney, Atari, and Digital Eclipse announcing their Complete Edition remaster earlier this year. It was revealed with a collection of other soon-to-be-re-released Toy Story games as part of what is being called Toy Story: Retro Roundup.

Both games will arrive for PC, Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, PS4, PS5, and Xbox Series X | S come October 15. Pricing will vary between physical and digital editions, as well as your platform of choice.

A physical two-pack bundle, which comes with both the Complete Edition and Retro Roundup, is listed at $39.99 for the original Switch and PlayStation platforms, while a physical copy for Switch 2 is more expensive at $49.99. The Nintendo eShop, meanwhile, lists the standalone Toy Story 3 remaster for $19.99 for either Switch console. Regardless, you'll be spending extra cash on those new bells and whistles if you want to play Toy Story 3 after the September cutoff.

"Reopen the toy chest and saddle up as Woody, Buzz Lightyear, and Jessie in Toy Story 3 Complete Edition, a 3D adventure based on the hit 2010 animated film, Toy Story 3," an official description said. "Now available for modern systems, the updated game features improved graphics and a few new surprises in store. Play through authentic moments from the movie in Story Mode, or drop into the wild west sandbox of Woody’s Roundup in Toy Box Mode."

Toy Story 3 is highly regarded, at least as far as movie tie-in games go. IGN gave it a 7.5/10 review in 2010, calling it "an example of when a license game is done mostly right."

Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He's best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).

It’s somewhat sobering to think that the Mafia franchise is nearly a quarter of a century old. Many of the people who make the games have been working on it for even longer. What began life in 2002 with the release of Illusion Softworks’ Mafia has become a significant franchise for publisher 2K. And, like most other series of similar vintage, Mafia has seen its ups and downs. But it is still alive and kicking, even now, 25 years later.

Today, August 14, 2K releases Mafia: The Omertà Collection, which includes Mafia: The Old Country Definitive Edition, Mafia: Definitive Edition, Mafia 2: Definitive Edition, and Mafia 3: Definitive Edition. There’s also a free update for Mafia: Definitive Edition on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S to add 60 frames-per-second gameplay — something fans have been crying out for for years. It’s a busy time indeed for the Mafia franchise and its developer, Hangar 13.

It is impossible to provide a comprehensive 'making of' the entire franchise and all its years of development in a single hour-long interview, but I gave it a good shot when I sat down to talk to Hangar 13 president Nick Baynes, Hangar 13 general manager Roman Hladík, Mafia: The Old Country game director Alex Cox, and cinematics director Tomas Hrebicek. Roman and Tomas, by the way, have worked on Mafia from the very beginning, joining the Czech Republic studio Illusion Softworks in the city of Brno to shape what would become the first Mafia video game. They’ve seen it all: the acquisition from 2K parent company Take-Two in 2008, the rebrand to 2K Czech, and the merger into 2K’s Hangar 13 in 2017, and they are still here, still making Mafia games.

So, if you’ve got even a passing interest in the Mafia games, I hope you find something interesting in the interview below. We discuss all the main games and the challenges they faced, get some insight into the decisions that were made at the time, and there’s even room for a little Mafia tease for the future.

Mafia 1

IGN: I think the obvious starting point is at the beginning, the initial premise of what Mafia was setting out to do. Is it possible to trace that line to where it is now and how it's evolved?

Roman Hladík: If I go back to the early times of Illusion Softworks, which was the indie studio where it all started, we joined it probably in 1998, if I remember well. It was at a time when the studio was already working on Hidden & Dangerous 1, the game, and the owner of the studio wanted to extend the business and basically establish another group. So he called a couple of us, but we were really young folks at the time with very little experience of making games as hobbies. And first we were thinking about something completely different, but then the owner of the studio went to an exhibition and came back with the idea or with the information that the game we were considering, many other similar games were being developed at the time.

We started to think about a game that would be about crime, police, maybe a policeman investigating the crime, but it flipped around later on. And I think it was Daniel Vávra who brought the idea that there would be a strong story, which was not that common at the time. And so it happened that the first original Mafia was mostly appreciated for the story, for combining the gameplay elements and the story.

I don't think that was a clear intention at the beginning. It just happened, how the ideas were coming together and what we liked to play and so on. So it was, I would say, pure passion at that time driving us to deliver something like that. And I have to say that we were all a little bit naive at the time. We didn't know what we were going to do. So we also struggled a lot to finish the game. It took us four, four-and-a-half years probably, and it was all right back then.

Tomas Hrebicek: I remember we liked the gangster movies, the romance behind it. So we were watching Godfather, Miller's Crossing, and Goodfellas. So I think that all combined also the idea and we were starting to talk about that kind of game and the story and enjoy the romantic part of the gangsters, but also to show the dark sides of it. And as Roman said, this time we want to bring this super strong story, but also it was the first time we started to do the cinematography in the games. I believe we were the first ones to pay so much attention to the cinematics part in that. So as Roman said, we were pretty young, naive, and we were learning. Myself, I was responsible for the cinematics, but I didn't have any school on that. I was just watching movies, analyzing them shot by shot. And all of us were just learning on the way and trying to do the best.

Roman Hladík: And it's fair to say that it was Tomas who brought the cinematic part to the game, and he does it still today basically on all the Mafias.

IGN: How did you feel coming off the back of the first Mafia? Did its success take anyone by surprise? Was there a feeling even then that this was going to be a long-running franchise and you had to start plotting things out in a grander sense?

Roman Hladík: I would say for us as developers, it came as a surprise. We didn't expect this original Mafia to be this successful. Maybe the owner, Petr Vochozka, at that time was hoping for a huge success. But I think to all of us who were on the team, it came as a surprise. Because finishing a game — and I think it's still the same — at some point it feels a little bit endless. You are still debugging and iterating on the game and we are already tired and frustrated. So I would say we had that negative feeling in ourselves.

But then when it came out and players appreciate it, it's always a pleasure to feel that feedback. If the game is well received, then you're getting the positive feedback. So definitely it was, at least for me, a surprise. And because it was a commercial success as well, it was quite obvious that we are going to do the second one.

Alex Cox: I started working on the franchise a couple of years after this was, but one thing that always struck me is how much of a cultural export Mafia was from the Czech Republic, at the time, a country that was still 10 years or so independent. And if we think about Tomb Raider and how that was for the UK as something that broke out as a video game property, I think that's double the case for Mafia from the Czech Republic, from a relatively small country in Central Europe, for the games being internationally successful was quite a big deal for you guys, I assume.

When I visited the country for the first time, I was very surprised at how many people knew Mafia when, for example, you're in a taxi and the taxi driver knows the franchise. It was much, much more high profile than I was expecting when I arrived there. So I don't know whether you guys enjoy any degree of celebrity in a way that might be surprising to people outside of Czech?

Tomas Hrebicek: I would say it took us by surprise because as Roman said, it took us so much time to develop the first game. I'm not happy with the output until I get the positive feedback from the audience. So I see a lot of things we can improve always. And also I would say the marketing was not back then, it was not that strong in America. And so it was a huge positive surprise how widely and internationally Mafia was known. So as Roman said, it was a commercial success, so that opened the door to Mafia 2. And I think Alex, you joined towards the end or the middle of Mafia 2?

Alex Cox: Around the middle, yes. I was working for 2K at the time and I joined the project when 2K were going to acquire Illusion. The game had been in development for several years with Illusion as an independent studio. Take-Two had worked with Illusion on many games before, including Hidden & Dangerous. And so there was a close commercial relationship between the studio and the publisher. And because 2K had a lot of faith in Mafia 2 in particular, the studio was acquired and Illusion became 2K Czech a couple of years before Mafia 2 was shipped. And that was when I first joined the story as a producer at the time at 2K.

Mafia 2

Roman Hladík: As Alex mentioned, it took us seven years to develop the second Mafia, which was even more than the first one. And why I think it happened? After the success of the original Mafia, we got a feeling that now we can do whatever we want. And the ambitions were really high. So I would say we set up the design and the ambitions for our second Mafia really high. And then obviously it was maybe a bit too big a challenge for the team to work it out. And also the technology has developed over the time. The competition was stronger and so on. So that was all the reasons why it took seven years. Well, again, we made it in the end, but it was also a long time and not easy time, all the time.

Alex Cox: But you mentioned the competition. It's interesting, isn't it? If we cast our minds back to that time, open world crime games were very popular. There were a lot of other franchises out there as well trying to do the same kind of thing. And there was a transition, wasn't there? Because the original Mafia was primarily a PC game. It was a game that was developed on PC. It had an awkward console port, but actually it gained a lot of its popularity within the PC audience because it was the first open-world crime game that was available on PC. Obviously had the cinematic approach you guys discussed.

But at the time, the big challenge, I think, was to move the game from its PC roots. We were in the pre-Steam era there. So PC was a relatively limited market. And there was a big commercial push to make the game into a console game to get out there alongside the other open-world crime games that were breaking out in the mass market.

And that was one of the big technological challenges, wasn't it? Because halfway through development, there was a big engine change, wasn't there? To go from RenderWare to start with and then onto your own engine, which contributes to the delays and create quite a lot of complexity and challenges there?

Roman Hladík: That's all correct. It was technology which was challenging, and it was also the growth of the studio, the team. Because when we were finishing Mafia 1, it was around maybe 30 people. But then on Mafia 2, we grew up to almost 200, if I remember well. So it was also about managing the bigger team and all the challenges which are coming with that.

Nick Baynes: At that time, I think I'm right in saying the entire team was in Czech?

Alex Cox: That's right. The whole team was in Czech. I mean, obviously the studio’s evolved over the course of time to be much more international, but there was a big culture change as well, wasn't there at that time as I remember. I was working for the publisher. We became very much more closely involved with development when Illusion joined the 2K group. And I think there was a big culture change for you guys there as well, wasn't there, in terms of how to adapt to something like a more modern game development studio.

Tomas Hrebicek: It was a great transition from this just closed Czech-only studio in Mafia 1, transitioned through Mafia 2, partially international because we have cooperation with 2K publishing. For example, all the motion capture for the first two games were happening purely in Czech Republic. And then the English performance was done by dubbing ADR post-pro.

During Mafia 2, we came already to sound booth studios together and we spent months recording voiceovers, playing the real dubbing of the cinematics. And the difference is really visible between the Mafia 1 and Mafia 2. So the cooperation was much closer. And then on Mafia 3, we worked with American actors in an American studio. So there was transition over the games.

Alex Cox: That's really interesting, isn't it? Because I remember the first game was translated from Czech, Daniel Vávra’s script in Czech, and then someone in the UK fixed up some typos and text issues in the script. In the second game, actually an American scriptwriter took the script, didn't they? And they spent months and months reworking it and actually working with the talent in the studio. So that was a big evolution in terms of the creative quality of the VO. And then obviously you guys were working to the VO when you were doing the mocap, so that was interesting.

And then by the time we got to three, of course, yeah, we were doing all of that creative production side of things had largely moved to America. So again, there was I'd say a step up in terms of certainly the Americanization aspect of it. It was quite unusual for you guys to be writing American games and stories set in America from Czech Republic, obviously, with a lot of references to TV shows and movies rather than lived experiences.

Tomas Hrebicek: What's funny, a lot of stuff in original Mafia 1 is from Brno, like the church and all that stuff. So we were just trying to get the American feeling from the photos from the books, but all the influences were taken in Brno, here around. On Mafia 2 and Mafia 3, we are able already to travel and take the pictures and real stuff in America.

IGN: How do you feel about Mafia 2 looking back, good and bad? Is there anything there that you think you could have perhaps done slightly differently?

Roman Hladík: Well, it's difficult to say. I have to say that I like the Mafia 2 a lot. Because I think we managed to get the atmosphere of an American city better than what we did in the first one, for the reasons which Tomas mentioned. Because no one of us was traveling to U.S. before. So with Mafia 2, we already had a chance and we tried to do our best to capture that in the game. It's always stylized. The city is much smaller than the real cities, whatever, but I think we got it in a much better way.

I think we've been criticized at the time that we are not using the open world as much as we should. That was maybe what was dragging our scores a little bit lower during the release. But it's interesting that over the time people appreciate Mafia 2 more and more. They don't see these flaws and they enjoyed the story, which is great. So I think there was a little bit of controversy in the Mafia 2 was released because it probably didn't match all the expectations from players, but it still delivered a very solid entertainment story and activities, which players started to like. I don't know how to say that. It's always about the expectations versus the reality, and there was a little bit of gap there. So I wish we could deliver more. But as we said before, it was a challenging project for all of us and we did our best, and that's what was released in the end.

So maybe if we do it these days, we would probably deliver more of the content to the open world. But that's all I can say probably.

Alex Cox: At the time, a lot of games were expanding outwards, weren't they? So I think what you say there Roman is completely true. What players expected and what they got was not quite the same thing, but it's not because of what we tried to — I think we were quite honest about what the game was when we launched it — but players quite reasonably had an expectation, I think, particularly in terms of more open-world content.

There were stories about we cut lots of stuff out of the game and things like that as well, which was swirling around after launch, which were quite exaggerated. I mean, to Roman’s point, it was a difficult game to launch and we did have to trim a bit of scope, but we didn't change the game dramatically from a huge open-world game to what it was. I mean, we are talking about a little bit of side content only really.

Looking back on it now, I completely agree with Roman. It's the game that came closest, I think, to matching everybody's fantasy in their mind about what they see when they see Mafia on a box. I might be repeating something that Daniel Vávra said in the past, that Mafia 2 was almost his revision of Mafia 1 almost to improve and resolve issues that he had with the first game and wanting to do better. And I think he succeeded there in terms of the story. And it hit that kind of Goodfellas kind of vibe, which resonated well in terms of the story, in terms of the tone, in terms of the setting and everything like that landed very well.

I just think it suffered a little bit from players' expectations at the time, when more was certainly considered better in almost every way for an open-world game. But yeah, I still think it's remembered very fondly, and I think for all of the right reasons, that's it’s lasted the test of time.

Roman Hladík: What I think worked well in Mafia 2 was this chemistry between the main character, Vito, and his fellow Joe Barbaro. That's probably something which people liked and it was really fun to see the story based on those two characters that works still today, I believe, when people play it.

Mafia 3

IGN: When it was decided that Mafia 3 would follow, what were you trying to achieve? It followed six years after Mafia 2, so there was a huge amount of development time there as well. It'd be great to get some insight into the ups and downs of that.

Alex Cox: Mafia 3 was a long journey, and actually that did coincide with another evolution of the studio structure as well. So my part of the story, I started working at the studio as a designer at that point so I can talk as a developer for Mafia 3. We started on a version of Mafia 3 in the Czech Republic. So there was a prototype version of Mafia 3, an earlier version of the game that ultimately we shipped, that we worked on for a couple of years after Mafia 2. And the goal was to go much more open world. So that was our whole angle on it. There was a story. Again, the story was quite a lot different than the one we ultimately shipped, but it did involve the New Orleans setting that we ultimately used for Mafia 3.

And again, it had quite a different design. We were going quite heavily into the idea of story optionality, story choices and things like that. There was a different hero. It was much more focused on the Italian Mafia kind of vibe, and it was more of a direct sequence to Mafia 2.

But that project for one reason or another fell on stony ground. We had some development challenges there, particularly on the technical side. Our ambition started to overreach because we were still basically building on top of the Mafia 2 engine, and our ambitions were starting to overreach what we were able to technically do, particularly in terms of — actually talk about quite straightforward development concerns — it was becoming harder and harder for us to recruit developers because the tech was so idiosyncratic. While a lot of the broad swathe of game development was moving to middleware and standardized editors and things like that in terms of how to develop, our internal technology was becoming increasingly difficult to recruit.

And also at the time, obviously 15 years ago, we were requiring people to move to the Czech Republic. It was more and more difficult for us to recruit internationally as well. And that was becoming a bigger need because we needed to bring in talent to help to meet modern expectations for open-world games. So we had various challenges there that ultimately resulted in a new studio being formed, and the studio being rebranded from 2K Czech to Hangar 13, the studio that shipped Mafia 3, and a new studio location being opened in California in Novato. And there was a reboot of the project at that point. We focused in on the New Orleans story part of the story from the first version of the game, but the reboot took a significantly different direction. And the new studio head who is no longer with us, Haden Blackman, who was also the creative leader of the project, took over.

And so that ultimately over the course of the next three or so years after that led to Mafia 3. So the same kind of design intent, to move Mafia more towards an open-world format. But the story changed significantly, about the civil rights storyline, Lincoln Clay as the hero, the idea of the black mafia versus the Italian mafia as the enemy. All of those concepts came in alongside a big shift in terms of the game design approach to, let's say, maximum open world, if we were going to describe it kindly.

Roman Hladík: I think that was the important change during the development, that the new creative mind behind the Mafia was Haden Blackman. But the studio, which at the time was formed at Novato, California, was not purely new people coming. It was also a lot of people moving from Czech to the U.S. who were then working from there. So it was a mixture of original Mafia developers and new people coming to California to work on Mafia 3.

Nick Baynes: And of course the team back in Czech continued to exist, so it was an extension of that team, right?

Alex Cox: Yes. And that was, again, another big culture change for the studio. The California studio brought in an awful lot of talent as well. We had the benefit of being able to recruit from places like LucasArts and others in the Bay Area. So that brought a lot of expertise onto the team, which was great.

Mafia 3 was another hard development. And unfortunately, I think our ambition, again, was ultimately what held the project back in the end. The superb story, all of the same strengths as the previous two titles. I think Haden and the narrative team did a great job in presenting this civil rights storyline, treading quite a tightrope there of putting that on the screen in a way that I think most games would shy away from. And so we're very proud of how that aspect of the project landed. It's just a bit of a shame that — I don't think there's any secret here to say that the open-world elements of the game actually ended up holding it back despite being something that we'd invested heavily in.

But the positive part of that story — the game did okay only, commercially, critically a little bit disappointing — but the engine, the technical aspect of the game, we did manage to solve, and our internal technology really got up to a great standard. And that actually in the end helped us to move onto the path we're on now, because that helped us to do Mafia: Definitive Edition and the remake of Mafia, which we did several years later off the back of the Mafia 3 technology. So there was a nice unexpected benefit to that once we did finish that game.

Roman Hladík: Something the team in California brought to Mafia, it was a little bit better set in the U.S. environment, I would say. We did Mafia in Europe, and it was always our stylized view of how the American cities are looking like, how the life is in those cities and how the American mafia works. So I think having Haden Blackman in charge and having so many designers in California, it allowed us to deliver more on what… I would say for U.S. market, it was suddenly not a European view of their country. It was more fitting the U.S. customers, I would say. That's what happened as well with Mafia 3. For the first time we used the likeness of the actors, which was not the case in previous Mafias.

IGN: Was the initial focus on open world a reaction to Mafia 2? Was it about the trends at the time? Why was that the big investment?

Roman Hladík: I think it was the feedback from 2. And to be honest, for us as developers, when you are building a huge city, you want to use it, you want to deliver other stories, other activities within that city. And what constrained us on 2 was our ability to deliver on time, I would say. So it was quite obvious that we are going to try in a better way in the Mafia 3. And I think it did well. Maybe the activities in the open-world of Mafia 3 might be a little bit repetitive, but I think you can spend much, much more time in that game and enjoy the environment than it was in previous Mafias. So yes, definitely the feedback from the players was the driver.

Alex Cox: We've got quite a fractured audience actually now. Each of the Mafia games is somewhat different to the others. There's maybe a consistent core through the middle of narrative-driven action adventure, but each iteration of the game has brought in a new tranche of players to our audience base. And actually there are a sizable number, maybe a more silent number of players that like Mafia 3, like that kind of, let's say, Ubisoft style territory control style open-world that we focused on in that game. And it was quite successful for them, particularly in terms of providing lots of gameplay hours. Everything that Roman just mentioned, that did land well with a sizable proportion of players. And actually of all of the games that we've shipped, Mafia 3 has reached the most players by far. It was the biggest Mafia game that we ever did in terms of its scope, its scale, budget, its marketing, everything, and was successful relative to all of those factors.

And it was, I think, a reaction to Mafia 2 by and large. Certainly because of where games were at the time, pushing more open-world was seen as the way to make the game better and more successful, certainly by everybody. There was a widespread belief that this would succeed.

IGN: People do compare Mafia to GTA, rightly and wrongly. You see videos comparing the two games all the time. Has the comparison to GTA become a part of the Mafia franchise, irrespective of whether you’ve gone more open world or linear? Is that a thing that has factored into any thinking around what you do? Or is it just one of those things that happens online and isn't really reflective of the reality of the audience that you've built for the franchise?

Nick Baynes: I think that genuinely at the studio, we've got our own path. It genuinely never ever comes up in conversation as a touchpoint or steering our strategy or anything like that. I think obviously there's a lot of stories about that game out there right now because something's coming out later this year! But yeah, genuinely, I think it's an internet thing. It's not something the studio looks at. So I think I'm afraid there's not a rich vein of answers to give you for that.

Mafia: Definitive Edition

IGN: The Old Country went back on that open-world investment again to a more focused, linear game. It’s been out for a year now. How do you feel about it, and what development challenges did you face?

Nick Baynes: Around 2018 is when I and Brighton enters the scene, so I'm the new boy of eight years compared to these guys. But I think it'd be remiss, I think, to go straight to The Old Country without acknowledging the importance of Mafia: Definitive Edition as well. Because I think that if you look at Hangar 13 as a studio, it had gone off in a slightly different direction around the time the Brighton studio started. We were working on another game, but the Brighton studio was growing. We wanted to ship something because the game we're working on ultimately didn't ship, but it was quite a large, ambitious game. So we wanted to ship something as a studio. We wanted to find something to help grow Brighton and build the teams and how we all worked together.

And we felt that it was an appropriate time to build on the Mafia 3 engine and do a remake of Mafia 1, which I think actually was probably one of the first wave of the modern remakes. I think now obviously there's a lot of ground up remakes that are made, but I think when we were doing Mafia: Definitive Edition, we were certainly one of the first ones I think came out of that. And that was interesting because firstly, it created this really great working relationship and team structure between the UK office and Czech, which is where the Mafia games are made pretty much exclusively these days. It also showed us actually the amount of love that came back for that game in terms of just the story focus, the rough size of it in terms of scope. And so when the studio did go through a few more changes a couple of years later and we were looking at what we wanted to do with the franchise, it felt like it was a good time to — you talked earlier about the through line — to go back to that almost to what made Mafia great in the first place. Very tight, focused, authentic narrative stories that really immersed the player. And for us, we were going into a new engine. We were going back to the origin of Mafia. It was very much a case of let's deliver a classic Mafia story and then grow it from there.

And by grow it from there, what I mean is also the additional content we worked on over the last year in terms of, when you add in the DLC and the extra free ride content and the open-world content that you can access there, suddenly it feels like a much deeper package. That was just to add that context in the middle of the jump from Mafia 3 to The Old Country.

Alex Cox: And I do think there's an interesting part of the story there because, coming back to what you were saying earlier on about the reaction to Mafia 2, well the reaction to Mafia 3 is also what's triggered this next part. So the reaction to Mafia 3 was questionable, of course, we've seen that in the reviews. And so the game that Nick alluded to was a reaction to that. It was a different game. It was a very different genre, but it was something that struggled to find its path internally. And over the course of several years was still in development when we decided to go back to Mafia and do what was effectively a side project at the time.

But actually, as it turned out, that other project never really found its path. But what did find its path was actually going back to the roots of Mafia and rediscovering something that, as Nick said, connected everybody in the studio. We knew what we were making. It was actually a game that by and large everybody in the studio wanted to make. It was playing to our strengths. We were learning a lot of lessons there in terms of trying to do a game in a different genre with mechanics and technology that we don't know how to do. It's much more challenging than maybe people anticipated. And finding a safe haven back in Mafia was great for us.

But then as we did the game — and that was actually very successful as well — and so when the other project faltered in the end and did result in some studio reorganization, we found a new north star in terms of designing back around Mafia. But also the principles that made the original Mafia and the remake successful — and it did do quite well critically and it did well commercially — was that linear storytelling mode. It still had its audience. The players of all of the previous Mafia games came back to it and they enjoyed playing it.

And so that set the scene really for The Old Country, because while The Old Country didn't increase in terms of scope or technical ambition, under the hood it was because actually we discarded the Mafia 3 engine and we moved to Unreal. And so, while on the screen the game looks smaller and more focused, actually a lot of development effort went into rebuilding the engine completely. So that's something that players don't see of course on the screen. And we were trying to code as far as possible to make it feel, look, and play like a next-gen Mafia title. But that kind of under the hood investment in having to basically rebuild the whole engine under the hood is what that game was partly about strategically in addition to moving the franchise forward in a new way.

Mafia: The Old Country

Nick Baynes: A couple of times during this conversation we've talked about maybe Mafia 2 not quite meeting players' expectations, or Mafia 3 maybe going in a way that some people liked, but other people felt it had stumbled in certain areas. I think that the franchise throughout from the very, very beginning, the fact that we've had such strong characters, such compelling stories and people fall in love with the worlds, I think this is why all of our games, the audience, the affection for the games grows over time. And I think it's like, even when there has been the odd mismatched expectation at release, you go on Reddit now and you see people debating which one's their favorite Mafia game, and you'll quite often get four different answers. There's a sizeable group that will say Mafia 3 is the best Mafia game. And a sizeable group will say Mafia 2 is the best Mafia game.

The reason why it does stick with people and why it does grow over time is that people do love these stories and they do love the characters. And that was really one of the things we wanted to do with The Old Country. In fact, it was a very big thing for us at the start: the importance of finding a protagonist that players are going to really embrace and want to live with them and play the game in their shoes. And we certainly saw that with Enzo. I think Alex and the team did a great job with all the characters in The Old Country. The cast of characters is probably the strongest we've had in terms of number of strong characters that people have really fallen in love with. It's about playing to our strengths and making sure we're capturing all the ingredients of what really is the essence of Mafia.

Roman Hladík: It's interesting to see the reactions from the players. Because these days people are playing almost endless games with endless grind, they really appreciated a shorter, more intensive story. And obviously there are also people who want to stay within the world we've built and enjoy it a little bit more. And for them, we released the free ride and now the DLC. So I think it's also about the market developing somehow. And the appetite for huge games is also limited, and they might be missing the other segment which we are trying to get to.

Alex Cox: Looking back on the game now, I think there's a very warm reaction to those characters. And I think that, Roman, you mentioned earlier on Vito and Joe, Lincoln, this is the core of every successful narrative adventure game, isn't it? Ultimately, it does boil down to the story basics, things like the characters are what really sticks with players. And they've become already in the last year part of the firmament of characters that the community refers to. And that benefit of being, let's say, a surviving franchise, a franchise that somehow has survived all of these challenges and the changes in the market, and we're still able to make Mafia games now is something we're very grateful for.

Because of course we do have this big community. You see other franchises that have been around for this kind of time period as well, they've built up such a big community of players that have had great memories of playing them over the years that to a large extent they become a little bit self-sustaining, don't they? That's something that we've ground out over a long period of time, and we're very grateful for that, I think, to be able to still be able to make Mafia games now.

Mafia: The Omertà Collection

IGN: What can you tell me about the Mafia: The Omertà Collection?

Nick Baynes: It collects all of the Definitive Editions alongside Mafia: The Old Country Definitive Edition, which is the original game plus the DLC and all the open world content that we've added in terms of free ride. It's a new way for players to pick up the whole franchise again.

We're also at the same time bringing out a PS5 and Xbox update to Mafia 1. Fans have been asking for 60 frames-per-second and a few quality-of-life, things like that. That’s free for all players.

We saw a lot of players come to Mafia for the first time with The Old Country and then go back and discover other games. So for people that haven't dipped their toe into all of the games that came before The Old County, this is a good opportunity for them to pick it up at that point.

IGN: What's next in terms of mainline releases or even remakes? You remade Mafia 1. I see fans all the time asking for a remake of Mafia 2, but also do you naturally move on to another Mafia sequel? Getting a sense of the future for this franchise and how you view it would be really great.

Nick Baynes: It's been interesting over the course of this conversation to think that this all started in 1998, and I only got involved eight years ago. I genuinely feel quite humbled and honored by the fact that we've still got so many people who've been there from the start, or some people who joined along the way. So we've spent all this time working on this franchise, working on telling these amazing stories. And we've obviously invested a lot in changing the engine and modernizing certain aspects of the way we make games with The Old Country. I'm not going to give you any details or talk about anything specifically about what's next, but I will say that we're very grateful that players perceived The Old Country so well, and it's given us the opportunity to continue to lead the way hopefully in telling these great narrative stories and keep on doing what we're doing. And so that's as much as you're going to get, I think!

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Cast your mind back to November 2011, and two big fantasy games based on established IPs came out pretty much at the same time: Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which went on to sell over 65 million copies, and Snowblind Studios’ The Lord of the Rings: War in the North, which failed commercially.

In retrospect, it was perhaps unwise for publisher Warner Bros. to release The Lord of the Rings: War in the North in the same week as Skyrim, given the extreme hype Bethesda’s behemoth enjoyed ahead of launch. But that’s exactly what Warner Bros. did — despite, it seems, the advice not to do so that it received from at least one high-ranking developer it had on its books.

Christian Allen was the design director on the WB Games Seattle leadership team at the time, working on the likes of Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, Mad Max, and F.E.A.R. 2: Reborn. He noticed this week’s surprise Aspyr-developed re-release of The Lord of the Rings: War in the North across PC and console, and it sparked something of a trip down memory lane.

In a series of tweets, Allen said that he tried to convince the powers that be at Warner Bros. to avoid Skyrim for obvious reasons, but he was “overruled.”

“Wow, this is cool,” he began. “15 years ago I argued vociferously not to release this up against Skyrim, as it wouldn't get a fair shake. I got overruled. Nice to see it get a proper release.”

Why did Warner Bros. make such an obviously risky decision here? Allen added some context: “Quarterly revenue motivations drive more decisions than people realize. It's a big challenge with stock-price driven organizations. Must be hard to be an exec and go, ‘Well, this game will do better if we hold it until March, but my bonus will take a 50% hit.’”

Allen went on to talk about the impact Skyrim had on the visibility of Snowblind’s game. “At the time it really seemed to get lost in the wash, and every review just compared it to Skyrim (as I predicted they would),” he said.

“I think it only got like one review the week it launched,” he continued. “IIRC there was hardly any marketing, either they wrote it off or thought hardcore LOTR fans would just know about it, somehow.”

Following the failure of The Lord of the Rings: War in the North, Snowblind was merged with Monolith Productions, which went on to release Gotham City Impostors, Guardians of Middle-earth, and the much-loved Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and Middle-earth: Shadow of War.

Last year, Warner Bros. closed Monolith down, having canceled its Wonder Woman video game. Allen is now design director on Steam hit Project Zomboid.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Benson Russell, designer for two of the original Uncharted games and a current developer at Naughty Dog, explained why he’s hesitant to welcome a potential remake of Drake’s Fortune.

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune released in 2007 on the PlayStation 3. It’s the first game in the original Uncharted trilogy and a title that studios still take inspiration from to this day, even two decades later.

Over the last two years, rumors have surfaced claiming that Naughty Dog is considering a remake of the iconic game. While this was mere speculation, players finally got to hear straight from the horse’s mouth in August 2026 when Benson Russell, designer for Drake’s Fortune and Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, spoke out about the subject in a conversation with FRVR.

For Russell, remakes don’t make sense if the original games are still part of the cultural zeitgeist, making the idea of a Drake's Fortune remake something of an uncessary task in his view.

“Uncharted as a thing is still in the zeitgeist,” he told the outlet. “System Shock… a remake of that now makes a lot of sense, because not just can you play it, but it had horrible key bindings, it kept a lot of people out of it from wanting to play it. There’s already a version [of Drake’s Fortune] you can play on modern consoles [to] get the experience. What’s the point of remastering [or remaking] it?”

“I just don’t see the point of remaking [it],” he continued. “You’d have to rewrite the whole story to make it better, which means you’re going to change the spirit and you’re going to change the scenes and what the first one was about, right? You’re going to have to add all these scenes or take things away and a lot of the key set pieces — are you going to keep those? Are you going to have to redo them because they don’t fit your story? It doesn’t make any sense [to remake it]. I honestly thought the same thing about The Last of Us Part 1… these are old games for a reason.”

Russell finished his spiel by saying a remake of Drake’s Fortune would feel “more like a cash grab than it would feel like anything necessary at this point,” saying, “Just don’t recreate the first game. It’s just, eh.”

While it’s currently unclear if Naughty Dog truly has any plans to work on a remake of Drake’s Fortune, it seems like all hands are on deck for the studio’s next title, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, which saw boss Neil Druckmann step away from his involvement in HBO’s The Last of Us series to better focus on. However, rumors of a Last of Us 3 game are also swirling around in the ether after Druckmann made a few comments online that hinted at another potential entry in the critically-acclaimed series.

Virginia (she/her) is IGN’s News Editor. With ten years of experience reporting on games and entertainment, she’s got a storied background in the fighting game community, influencer news, and viral online trends. Find her on Twitter at @TheeMissGlaze.

This is an IGN opinion piece from Ryan McCaffrey, who worked at Official Xbox Magazine from 2002-2012 during the original Xbox and Xbox 360 era before joining IGN, where he remains “the Xbox guy.” In the run-up to Xbox’s 25th anniversary, he’ll be sharing his memories from the platform’s first quarter-century.

Not every band hits it big with their first record. Sometimes it takes an extra album or two for the right storm of creativity to create lightning in a bottle. So too is this the case with video game development studios. Treyarch is one notable example: it was best known for making mostly mediocre licensed superhero games (ironic, given the subject matter of this column) before it broke out big as Infinity Ward’s partner on Call of Duty.

Another is UK-based Rocksteady, which didn’t really have any big hits to its name before its Batman: Arkham trilogy turned it into a game development superstar. Prior to its work with the bat, the studio made a pretty mediocre first-person action game in 2006 called Urban Chaos: Riot Response. You played as a riot-control team member, tasked with saving civilians in a city overrun by a gang.

I remember playing it back at Official Xbox Magazine. First-person shooters have long been my favorite genre, so during my days at the OXM office I’d give anything that used the first-person perspective a try. That led me to all kinds of incredible games I might’ve otherwise ignored, such as Breakdown for the original Xbox. But Urban Chaos wasn’t Breakdown. Nor was it good. OXM gave it a 5 out of 10. (IGN was kinder, awarding it a 7.9.)

Quite how Rocksteady went from the mediocre Urban Chaos to the greatest licensed superhero game anyone had seen – by a country mile – is something of a mystery. What happened behind the scenes that saw its staff graduate to such creative heights? Whatever the reason, that team – led by director Sefton Hill – went on to prove that Akham Asylum was anything but their one hit wonder. While the series would eventually stumble just a little bit with that damn drawn-out Batmobile section near the end of Arkham Knight, you won’t find anyone with an unkind word to say about either Arkham Asylum or its sublime sequel, Arkham City.

In fact, both are so good that, two generations later, a constant debate remains regarding which of Rocksteady’s first two Batman games is the pinnacle of the series. Some say Asylum is the best, others cite City. Both are right. (I’m in the City camp, for what it’s worth, as I prefer its larger open-world and I think its extremely dark story is even better than the stellar plot we got in Asylum).

But we’re here to talk about Rocksteady’s first game and the ground it broke. No matter whether you played it on an Xbox 360 or a PlayStation 3, you got an absolutely stunning game in the graphics department. It utilized Unreal Engine 3, and matched the engine’s graphical grunt with phenomenal art direction to create a game that felt like a grittier, more grown-up version of Batman: The Animated Series.

Speaking of which, casting Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill absolutely took Rocksteady’s brilliant game to the next level. In a sense, it legitimized it. Here were the two legendary Batman and Joker voice actors we’d grown up with on The Animated Series, now in an incredible Batman adventure we could play. And not just one we could play, but a much darker Batman universe than what was in the cartoon – age appropriate for the now-adult fans.

But as perfect as the voice casting was, and as gorgeous as the graphics were, Batman: Arkham Asylum rewrote the comic-book-game rules because it solved the gameplay puzzle. Whether you were leaning on the investigative side of the Dark Knight – perched atop gargoyles, scanning rooms with Detective Mode, and dropping down to grab unsuspecting foes before leaving them strung up for the Gotham City Police Department to collect later – or pulverizing packs of criminals with the combo-driven parry/hit/finish/chain-to-the-next-guy combat system, Arkham Asylum delivered on putting you inside Batman’s cowl in a way that no other video game had ever done before. And for those of you of a certain age, like me, you know that there had been many attempts over the years, prior to Rocksteady cracking the code.

In short, Batman: Arkham Asylum was both a breath of fresh air and a revelation. It deserved every accolade it got at the time. Without it, we’d have never had the thrills of the wider Arkham series, and probably would never have got Insomniac’s Spider-Man. And while they’re inching closer to being considered “retro”, you can fire up any of the Arkham games today – yes, even the very first one I’m talking about here – and they still hold up in both gameplay and story. Only the graphics might let you down in 2026, a full 17 years after it first released. That’s rare for any game to be able to claim with any legitimacy, but Arkham Asylum earns it.

Check out the other notable Xbox games I've looked back on in celebration of the brand's 25th anniversary:

• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
• Fight Night Round 3
• Inside

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, and a co-host of Next-Gen Console Watch. He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.

Sony has confirmed the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog for August 2026, which is headlined by Helldivers 2, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and Vampire Survivors.

It's a strong month, which also includes Hell is Us, Two Point Museum and Umamusume Pretty Derby - Party Dash, plus a couple of retro classics.

As ever, it's worth remembering that Sony is still experimenting with the timing of new PS Plus game releases, which means the games will be released on varying dates throughout the month if you're in the U.S., the UK and Japan. The full lineup will be available to play on July 21 in all other regions.

Earlier today, Helldivers 2 was confirmed for PlayStation Plus alongside a major new update and its long-awaited Warhammer 40,000 crossover Warbond. Here's the rest of the lineup, courtesy of the PlayStation Blog.

PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium | Game Catalog

• Helldivers 2 | PS5 - available globally today, August 12
• Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 | PS5 - available globally August 18
• Vampire Survivors | PS4, PS5 - available globally August 18
• Hell is Us | PS5 - available globally August 18, or August 25 in the U.S., the U.K. and Japan
• Umamusume Pretty Derby - Party Dash | PS4 - available globally August 18, or August 25 in the U.S., the U.K. and Japan
• Two Point Museum | PS5 - available globally August 18, or August 25 in the U.S., the U.K. and Japan
• Metro Exodus | PS4, PS5 - available globally August 18, or August 25 in the U.S., the U.K. and Japan
• Dying Light 2 | PS4, PS5 - available globally August 18, or August 25 in the U.S., the U.K. and Japan

PlayStation Plus Premium

• Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams | PS5, PS4 - available globally August 18
• Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire | PS5, PS4 - available globally July 21

Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social