Gangsters: Organized Crime, orders for the week

The other game I keep coming back to from 1998 is Gangsters: Organized Crime, by Hothouse Creations for Eidos. It is set in New Temperance, a fictional suburb of Chicago during Prohibition, and you start as a small-time crime boss with a handful of hoods and a lot of ambition.

What made it unlike anything else was the rhythm. Each turn you sat down and planned: which lieutenant takes which crew, which shops get visited for protection money, which business opens next. Then you let go, and the working week played out in real time on the city map while you watched your orders meet everyone else’s. Some of it went as planned. Much of it did not, and the next planning session started from whatever the week had left you.

Underneath was a whole small society. Hoods were people with skills, fists and knives and intelligence, recruited from gyms, pool halls and the unemployment office. Money came from protection rackets and from businesses, some legal and some not, and you needed an accountant to launder it and a lawyer to get your people out when they were arrested. Run things carelessly and the police and the FBI started paying attention. And there were three ways to win: take out every rival gang, get yourself elected mayor, or go straight and build a legitimate empire without the law on your back.

That last one is the part I think about most. The same machinery, the hoods, the money, the city, served three different stories, and only one of them was about violence. Most strategy games give you a world to conquer. Gangsters gave you a world to run, with the option of becoming respectable in it.

I have not played anything like it since, and like Precinct Assault, it sits in my head as a design worth picking up again: plan in turns, live with the consequences in real time, and let the player decide what winning means.

References

• Gangsters: Organized Crime, Wikipedia.