Empire of Sin

Brenda Romero interview — How Empire of Sin simulates the gangster life

Brenda Romero’s decades-long fascination with the mob comes to fruition on December 1 with the launch of Empire of Sin, a strategy game about being a mobster in Chicago during Prohibition.

The 1920s-era game has 14 different mob bosses, from Al Capone to Mabel Ryley, many of them real gangsters who stoked Romero’s curiosity when she was a child. Romero grew up in Ogdensburg, New York, at the Canadian border on the banks of the St. Lawrence River. You could hop on a boat to cross over to Canada. It had a bar called The Place, which was the oldest continuously operating bar in New York. It stayed open even during Prohibition, when others were forced to close. Romero wanted to know why, and her mother wouldn’t tell her that it had to do with the mob.

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Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.