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Mafia III developer Hangar 13 has revealed that the mobster sequel originally featured a prologue sequence deemed so controversial that the studio has literally erased it from existence.
While the game is pretty dark as it is, the original intro was apparently even more brutal than anything we got in the finished product. Apparently cutting it wasn't enough either; Hangar 13 didn't want it to leak and be viewed out of context, so they opted to scrub it from its servers.
Speaking with Eurogamer, the game's executive producer, Andrew Wilson, and game director Haden Blackman, confirmed that the original prologue detailed reasons as to why protagonist Lincoln Clay decided to join the army in the first place.
'We've never really talked about this anywhere,' said Blackman. 'We went back at the eleventh hour and added a cold-open to the game that was a really violent prologue which basically shows Lincoln and a couple of his friends getting ambushed by the mob. It's super-violent and Lincoln has to resort to violence to escape.'
The violent scenes mentioned involved Clay murdering a police officer, after which he packed his bags for Vietnam.
'If ever that had come out without any context in any form it would have looked terrible,' added Wilson.
Mafia III was released on PlayStation 4, PC, and Xbox One in October 2016.
