Mafia: The Old Country launch date set for August, according to updated Steam blog.

Mafia: The Old Country will release on August 8th, but shut your yap and don’t tell anyone, because developers Hangar 13 and publishers 2K Games appear to have revealed this early by accident. You didn’t hear any of this from me. I ain’t a rat. I’m not interested in things that don’t concern me.

I’ll tell you who is a rat – those dirty snitches over at Very Gorgonzola Computing. They claim somebody put up a Steam blog post that gave the big date away, in advance of a probable reveal at PAX East. The post has now been edited. Find a copy of the original on Bluesky.

Mafia: The Old Country takes the crime-does-pay series back to Sicily in the 1900s. It’s going for comparison with the Robert de Niro segments of Godfather: Part 2, in other words. The story follows Enzo Favara, and takes you from a childhood of servitude in Sicily’s sulfur mines to a promising career with the Torrisi crime family. It’s said to be more action-adventure, less open world game than the previous Mafia 3. I don’t have any particular thoughts on the new direction beyond that I am unreasonably attracted to the key artwork of the handsome shotgun lying in a crate of absolutely radiant lemons.

The new Mafia is also of interest because it’s from the same publisher as GTA 6, which is slated to launch on consoles this year (GTA 6 PC release date any time, Rockstar). Take-Two will definitely not be publishing them in close proximity. As when deducing the presence of black holes by monitoring the distorted light from nearby stars, it’s possible we can whittle down GTA 6’s release date by extrapolation.