Idea #3:1930's game

One of my all time favourite games is Illusion Softwork's (now called 2K Czech) 2002 game Mafia: City of Lost Heaven. Taking place over the course of the 1930's, it charts the rise of the protagonist, Tommy Angelo, in the ranks of the Salieri crime family in the fictional American city of Lost Heaven. The game map is huge, and the attention to detail is superb. It's filled with references to the Godfather movies (the Corleone Hotel, etc.) and other Mafia movies. But what really gets me is the level of immersion: it feels like a Prohibition-era city in the United States.

This idea is, I think, the most ambitious one I have (at least, at the moment), and really comes in two phases.

The first phase is to build a working 1920's/1930's city and surrounding countryside. I envisage this as being many times larger than the Mafia map, and including many things not seen in that game (for example, a working railroad that the "player" can use to travel long distances).

The second phase would be not a game per se, but the development of tools that would allow other people to build games (or even machinima) using the map developed in phase 1.

I imagine this will be some way away, as I need to improve a number of skills before I tackle a project this big, but I'm keeping a little notebook of ideas related to it (it's amazing how many ideas you get when you're just drifting off to sleep).

In the meantime, Mafia II is due this year, so that'll help with the mafia fix.