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.