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"I think it also helped that we put Vito in the game, who was the main character in Mafia MMORPG Game, and we had a lot of nods to the franchise as a whole. Lincoln is a really cool memorable character and I think that helped as well. Over time we weren't as worried about that; what we did take some time on and thought about a lot and did some focus testing on was, 'How are we portraying race? How are we using racial slurs? Are we going too far? Are we not going far enough?' We have some team members that grew up in the South and are black and would give us feedback that we weren't going far enough. We had a wide swath of players, not just African American players - female players, everybody, just to see where we were getting it right and where we were going too far or not far enough," he continued.

"And that informed a lot of the latter half of development and some changes that we made... So we were really sensitive to that I think but without it ever clouding the vision of 'This is a Mafia game and you're playing a criminal who is on this revenge storyline'."

There's no denying that Blackman and Hangar 13 were under enormous pressure from the beginning. Take-Two made Online Mafia Games the focus of E3 with a booth built to look like a Jazz bar from the period the game's set in. The publisher clearly had high hopes, but Blackman was also building up a brand-new studio while trying to craft a AAA experience that would please his bosses and meet his creative vision at the same time. It was no small feat to accomplish.