Kingpin: Life of Crime (1999)
Kingpin: Life of Crime is a 1999 shooter video game made by Xatrix Entertainment and Interplay Entertainment.
The player's character wakes up face-down in a back alley, beaten and left for dead on orders from a crime lord known only as the Kingpin. The rest of the game is a single-minded vendetta through a grimy urban underworld of warehouses, sewers, and gangland streets borrowed from late-'90s crime cinema. Corridors are dark, enemies are profane, and a mercenary hire system lets the player build a small crew. Cypress Hill scored the soundtrack, which tells you exactly what register you are in.
Quick answers
What is Kingpin: Life of Crime about?
The player's character wakes up face-down in a back alley, beaten and left for dead on orders from a crime lord known only as the Kingpin. The rest of the game is a single-minded vendetta through a grimy urban underworld of warehouses, sewers, and gangland streets borrowed from late-'90s crime cinema. Corridors are dark, enemies are profane, and a mercenary hire system lets the player build a small crew. Cypress Hill scored the soundtrack, which tells you exactly what register you are in.
When was Kingpin: Life of Crime released?
Kingpin: Life of Crime was released on 30 June 1999.
Who made Kingpin: Life of Crime?
Kingpin: Life of Crime was made by Xatrix Entertainment and Interplay Entertainment.
Similar games
Explore Kingpin: Life of Crime guides
Kingpin: Life of Crime in our writing
- Companion guide: Interplay: By Gamers, For Gamers, and the Golden Age of the RPG
A few thoughts on Kingpin: Life of Crime
If the street-criminal atmosphere is the draw, Kingpin carries the same bleak sensibility from a different angle: the NBC crime series follows a Mexican cartel figure navigating federal pressure, rival factions, and the personal cost of running at that level. The moral register is identical.
One man clawing his way back through a city's criminal underworld
Kingpin: Life of Crime is a single-minded climb from a beating in a back alley to revenge against the men who left him there. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Grand Theft Auto V both center on one person's rise through a crime-ruled city, Red Dead Redemption 2 follows an outlaw who can't outrun his gang, and The Punisher: One Last Kill puts a lone avenger back in the fight.
Crime empires and the men who actually run them
Kingpin: Life of Crime centers one boss's operation, but this angle looks past the gunman to the organizations behind the violence. Kingpin (2003) follows a cartel boss holding his empire together, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan: Ghost War traces conspiracy layers above street crime, Repo! The Genetic Opera imagines a corporation enforcing its will through organized brutality, and The Boys shows a company running its enforcers like a crime family.