IO Interactive recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of its flagship series Hitman, which has certainly been on a journey. Agent 47’s beautiful, barcoded bald head has become one of the industry’s icons, with the series’ growth into its own identity truly impressive: from the early days where it was a more traditional 3D action game with cool ways to kill people, to the lightbulb moment of Blood Money’s flexibility, to the sprawling sandbox extravaganza of the most recent trilogy (and not to forget false starts like Absolution).
That trilogy, now all bound-up as Hitman: World of Assassination, has a new upcoming collaboration with Eminem. This is another area where IO has expanded cleverly: choosing celebrities that are happy to become in-game “elusive targets” and building missions around their personae. Hitman is never going to be Fortnite, but these collabs make enormous sense and sprinkle a little something different (as well as stardust) around every so often.
“Of course there will be more Hitman,” says Abrak. “But right now, I think we need to get to the other side of this year and next year you’ll get more news about Hitman co-op, because I think co-op is a really, really good extension to the universe, and will introduce very interesting mechanics and combinations in World of Assassination. But we will, after that, be talking about the next Hitman—because, of course, there’s going to be a next Hitman.”
Also speaking in the interview is lead level designer Jacob Mikkelsen, who in an admirable move goes to bat for Hitman: Absolution (an ill-advised attempt to make a more narrative-focused and cinematic experience) as a valuable learning experience. Let’s be fair, we all need to learn what not to do.
“I don’t want to go back and change anything,” says Mikkelsen. “I think Absolution is, of course, the one that stands out as being different. But Absolution was a product of its time in so many ways, and we wanted to try something with a story that drove things more than what we saw in the previous games. And then we wanted to experiment with a different format of the gameplay.
“But that in itself, then led to, OK, now we know how to do better mechanics, better AI, better controls, better camera, better shooting, better on a lot of things. And then, when we paired that with the sandbox mentality for Blood Money, together they made up this new foundation that we could work on. So I don’t think I would change anything. And then also, looking back for so many years, and all the way back to Contracts—gaming was just different back in 2003. It was much more underground and nowadays, everybody is gaming on everything.”
Abrak ends by reeling off some impressive numbers: “We have had more than 85 million gamers play [Hitman: World of Assassination], and we have north of 25 million copies sold. Every month, we have more than a million people playing Hitman consistently. That’s pretty amazing after all these years.” And Agent 47’s days of creative murder are clearly far from over: hey, those cakes won’t poison themselves.
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