The GTA game series is my second most favourite game series that I know. I believe that many Mafia fans feel the same way. That is why combining these two game series together may seem tempting.
GTA 3 was released before Mafia 1 and it was the first open world game of its kind. If Mafia 1 had been released earlier, the Mafia game series might have been more popular than it was. Today we refer to games like Mafia or Saints Row as the genre of “GTA like”. If Mafia had been first, it could be “MAFIA like” instead. That is why I have always felt a bit less hyped about GTA 3 than most of my peers. I truly believe that Mafia 1 was better and in my opinion it did not get as much attention as it deserved or as it would have gotten, if GTA 3 had not been around yet.
The author of this map convert is one British gentleman named Greavesy who studied computer science with a focus on game development. He made an automatic batch file converter of maps of GTA 3, Vice City and San Andreas into Mafia 2. His most favourite GTA game is GTA 3, that’s why the first convert was a GTA III map. Two islands of Liberty City were converted. The last one with the airport was not. Because it was an automatic converting process, the results may not be perfect. Some alpha textures were not converted, being now non-transparent. And some materials are missing completely. The map is not optimised and it may cause lags. The irony is that the further you are from the map the more it lags, the closer you are, the more stable the game is. So if you are driving in a car on the map you notice no lags whatsoever.
You can take a look at the map in this video: