One of the main reasons why Mafia attracted so many fans and awards, was its originality and authentic recreation of time, and of course the game physics, extremely complicated and detailed car physics (tell me one more game that has a working clutch and a working temp and fuel guage!?), graphics, soundtrack, and how the story and gameplay emotionally attached the player to the game. When it was released, it was one of the first games to use EAX surround, motion capture etc and its graphics were really ahead of that time.