I've been gathering various screenshots of pre-release versions of Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven. They were sourced from various online sources and come in all shapes and quality variations. There were also plenty of duplicates, in which case I decided to keep the ones that offer higher resolution and quality, as well as those who have less obstructive watermarks (or none at all). Even though I used several deduplication tools to detect similar screenshots, some dupes may still remain (please let me know if you find them so I can remove them). And unfortunately, plenty of screenshots from long defunct web sites are no longer available, though some survived as thumbnails at least. I've also removed screenshots which can't be determined as pre-release (e.g. were mixed in with various pre-release screenshots but no date is provided and no notable differences were found).

You can view the screenshots here.

I figured the best way to share this is as a folder via a cloud service, since I'll continue to make changes to the collection as I find new screenshots and better variants of the existing ones. I'll talk about each screenshot briefly in this topic to point out interesting details and differences compared to the final version. As a start, here's a brief overview of the game's development:

• Development supposedly started in 1998 and ended in August 2002 when the game was released
• The game was delayed several times
• Initial name for the game was Gangster(s)
• The game initially ran on the Insanity engine, used by Hiden & Dangerous, Illusion Softworks' previous game
• First screenshots were released in May 2000 or so
• In July 2000 the Insanity engine was replaced with a newly made LS3D engine
• The game was presented at E3 2000, 2001 and 2002
• Alpha was finished in October 2001
• Beta testing was done during March 2002
• Multiplayer was planned (the racing game mode was partially developed) but later removed
• Of course loads of other things were either removed or changed substantially before release

I've decided to move this topic over to Mafia Scene, since there'll probably more interest in it there.

I added all the screenshots to the media folder on the FTP either way. Thanks for sharing.