Empire of Sin
Empire of Sin
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Empire of Sin: Brenda Romero spent decades noodling on this mob strategy-RPG

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 19 min

With Brenda Romero‘s Empire of Sin game about the Chicago mob, the place came first. From the days when she was a curious child and her mother wouldn’t tell her about it, Romero devoured all the information you could about Al Capone’s empire in the 1920s.

Then she put it on the shelf. She made 47 other games over the course of nearly 40 years, including Jagged Alliance and Gunman Taco Truck (conceived by her son). She won many awards for her work, and she became a program director for game design and development at the University of Limerick in Ireland. She also makes games with her husband, John Romero, and her family at Romero Games.

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Written by

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.