2K Games and Hangar 13 continue their promotional campaign around Mafia the Old Country, with a new Making of video, which reveals how the actors were chosen, with the key performance. To give life to the story of this mafia in full Sicily in the early 1900s, the teams went to look for actors who stick to the characters of Enzo, Isabella, Luca and Gaetano. For the Hangar 13 studio, this requires an entire performance capture, and the latter relied on TCAP technology (Total Capture), capable of recording in real time body movements, facial expressions and voice. This device makes it possible to preserve the emotional authenticity of a scene, without going through an artificial recomposition of its elements. The result, according to the developers, is an “truth of interpretation” which is reflected in the cutscenes, and especially in the implicit interactions of the game.
But capturing a performance is not just a matter of sensors: it is a work of support, confidence and sensitive management. The video shows how much the actors must deal with a naked tray, emptied of any decor, and despite everything bringing out the emotion. For this, Hangar 13 relies on two studios: Brno (Czech Republic) for systemic animations (NPC, Locomotion), and Petaluma (California) for narrative sequences, where the flesh of the game takes shape. To tell Sicily in the 1900s is also to tell a time when organized crime did not yet have the modern contours that cinema or video games have given it. Here, the mafia is not an empire, but a response to poverty, uprooting, social humiliation. The studio seems to want to use this backdrop to build a dramaturgy centered on emotion, guilt and loss. The release of Mafia The Old Country is expected for August 8 on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series.