Lincoln Clay and Thomas Burke of Mafia III.
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How developers created the story behind Mafia III and its lead character Lincoln Clay

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 12 min

After a deep playthrough, I’ve become very interested in the narrative story of the Mafia III video game coming from publisher 2K Games (a Take-Two Interactive division) on October 7.

It’s a simple mob revenge plot on one level, but the writers and designers from Hangar 13 have figured out how to build an immersive world around it, set in the turmoil of a fictional New Orleans in 1968, during the height of the Vietnam War. In that story, Vietnam veteran Lincoln Clay returns to find that his friends in the black mob who raised him are in trouble. He falls in with them and disaster occurs.

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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.