Mafia Wars

» see zynga.com/games/mafia-wars as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

mafia wars was the request-spam game. for a stretch of 2010 my facebook notification panel sat with twenty or thirty pending mafia wars invites at the top, from the three or four people on my friend list who had decided this was their thing. i never tapped accept. the game itself i never saw a single screen of, which is mostly the same relationship i had to all of zynga's catalog except farmville.

mafia wars launched on facebook in 2008. zynga's third title after texas holdem poker and yoville, with a clean gangster theme cribbed from a hundred mob movies. you ran jobs, leveled up, bought weapons and vehicles, recruited members from your facebook friend list into your mafia roster, then fought against other players' mafias for cash and respect. premium currency called reward points let you skip the energy timer or buy rare loot drops. the entire game was text-mode with small inventory icons and no animation beyond the click feedback.

the platform spread was wide for the era. facebook first, then myspace in 2009, then yahoo, then bebo, then ios in april 2009, then chrome web store after that. for a stretch in 2009 and 2010 mafia wars was the bridge product that proved zynga could move its catalog off facebook if it had to. honestly, the iphone version was the most successful mobile port zynga had made up to that point and a key data point in the company's pre-ipo story.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

this part you had to be in to understand. the actual game design was a thin loop. complete a job to earn xp and money, spend the money on better weapons, recruit more mafia members from friends to unlock higher jobs, fight rivals when energy refilled. wait for energy to refill, or pay reward points to refill it now. that was the whole game. for a slice of 2009 and 2010 it was one of the highest grossing applications on facebook because the loop ran fast enough to keep paying spenders engaged for hours at a time.

brand tie-ins came through with films like public enemies and the green hornet, with movie-promo content drops timed to release dates. zynga also raised about $1.2 million for haiti relief in 2010 by selling a special pack inside the game with proceeds donated. the webby people's voice award the same year was the cultural high water mark for the franchise.

~ the funny part ~

the lawsuit history was its own story. a developer named david maestri had built a game called mob wars and shipped it on facebook a few months before mafia wars launched. maestri sued zynga in 2009 for copyright infringement and trademark claims. zynga settled in september 2009 for somewhere between $7 and $9 million depending on which trade outlet you read. digital chocolate also sued over the trademark on mafia wars itself and won an injunction in 2010 that forced zynga to rebrand parts of the franchise temporarily.

mark pincus had said internally that mafia wars was the title he was most proud of in the early zynga catalog. by 2010 it was also the title carrying the heaviest set of legal claims, which became part of the broader narrative that zynga's growth strategy was built on aggressive cloning of competitors. the early zynga reputation was set in part by how mafia wars got built and how mafia wars defended itself in court.

~ the actual end ~

mafia wars 2 launched october 2011 with isometric 3d art that tried to make the gameplay loop look like more of a real game. it shut down december 30 2012, fifteen months in. the sequel was zynga's attempt to lift the franchise out of its text-mode shape and into something visually competitive with the cityville and farmville generation. it did not work. by then the social-game category itself was past peak.

the original mafia wars stayed live with a steadily shrinking but loyal player base through the back half of the early 2010s. zynga had announced wave after wave of facebook flash sunsets and the writing was on the wall for everything in the flash catalog. the formal shutdown landed on june 6 2016 (taken offline june 7). a mobile relaunch attempt in april 2017 lasted three months before zynga canceled all future work on the brand. the gangster-text-game corner of facebook was empty after that, with no successor product picking up the same loop.

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