![]() ![]() You start with a rudimentary number of businesses and quickly take over a safehouse, claiming your stake in Chicago’s bloated mob industry. At the start, you pick one of over a dozen color-coded crime bosses and are thrown headfirst into a world of crime. Somewhere between XCOM and Monopoly, Empire of Sin is a cross-genre, turn-based strategy, and resource management game. Romero Games’ Empire of Sin wouldn’t exist without this media, and it’s important context for understanding how the game works. Shootouts bubbled up outside of breweries crafting hooch right under the eyes of the crooked police force. Men carried Tommy Guns and drank Old Fashioneds in smoky, back-alley bars. Films like Scarface and Little Caesar titillated audiences with a world hidden behind the locked doors of our own cities: Women had perfectly finger-waved hair. Gone were the days of Jack the Ripper, the silent, lone killer, replaced with languid nights at speakeasies and the Omertà code. What once was a morbid habit of crowds forming at executions soon gave way to newspaper cartoons portraying devilish serial killers skulking the streets. At the dawn of cinema, the crime film found its audience. In 1842, Punch, a British satire magazine, printed an article saying, “Murder is, doubtless, a very shocking offense nevertheless, as what is done is not to be undone, let us make our money out of it.” This joke might have been sufficiently edgy at the time, but nowadays, it’s practically a given that murder makes money in the entertainment business. ![]() Remember Zynga’s Mafia Wars? Since the early 1800s (or, perhaps, the dawn of time itself) we’ve been fascinated by crime, especially organized crime that topic has served as a form of entertainment ever since. Image via Romero Games and Paradox Interactive ![]()
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