25 Years Later, Hitman Is Everything It Wanted To Be
Celebrating 25 years of IO Interactive’s influential stealth action series.
Video games have always thrived in creative iteration, and there’s no better example of a studio that’s benefited from this process than IO Interactive. When their debut game, Hitman: Codename 47, was released in November 2000, it was a janky hybrid of rudimentary stealth, third-person shooting, and the problem-solving mechanics of traditional adventure games.
Its wild amalgamation of ideas didn’t totally succeed, but it found its audience thanks to its slick presentation of underworld espionage. Over the next 25 years, IO took its ambitious idea for a definitive assassination sandbox from niche PC oddity to one of the best video game trilogies of all time.
Principal Level Designer Jacob Mikkelsen and Principal Game Director Matthias Angstrom, both IO veterans, spoke to Inverse about the Hitman series’ legacy. The two reflected on the technical trials, divisive experimentation, and unwavering vision that led to the studio’s award-winning magnum opus, and how it all led them to the studio’s next chapter. This is Hitman, 25 years later.
A Killer Identity
Agent 47, as he appears on the box art of the first game.
The Hitman series has always had one character at its center: the cold and calculating Agent 47, voiced by David Bateson. It’s through this quiet yet charismatic clone that players have peered into IO’s unique world of espionage.
But while 47 has become an icon thanks to his impeccable style and the barcode on his neck, he’s remarkably subdued compared to the heroes we’re used to seeing in games. That’s by design.
“The strength of the world of assassination lies in the empty vessel, because that means there's room for the player to put themselves into the role of Agent 47 and make him do what you want him to,” Mikkelsen says. “He has no opinion of what you do for good or bad.”
The Hitman series has never been afraid to get a little silly.
This leaves IO plenty of room to define Hitman through world-building. The series started off steeped in science fiction, as Agent 47 is a genetically engineered assassin created from the DNA of the world’s most dangerous criminals. But according to Angstrom, the first game’s shlocky setup let IO take the franchise “into pretty different tones.”
Hitman has oscillated wildly across eight games, usually and to its benefit. In one mission you’re hired to settle a dispute within a rich and bratty family, while the next mission may have you sneaking into a secret underground lab. Hitman can be a spy thriller, a grindhouse spectacle, a suburban horror flick, and a slapstick comedy, all in the same game.
Boxed In
The technical limitations of the original Hitman games kept IO from fufilling its goal.
While Hitman’s tonal identity is as fluid as Agent 47 himself, the game’s core design tenets are laser-focused on realizing the assassin fantasy with elaborate levels, depth of options, and player freedom.
Seminal 90s hits like Deus Ex and Thief: The Dark Project, also published by the now-defunct Eidos Interactive, influenced Hitman, but neither featured Hitman’s social stealth elements. Changing into enemy clothes to get behind their lines or using containers to sneak contraband into high-security areas were all exciting new ideas.
Unfortunately, the first three Hitman games were held back by rigid mechanics and level progression. IO always had the vision for what Hitman was supposed to be, but the era’s technical limitations boxed them in.
“When I joined IO, there were programmers, artists, animators, and audio designers,” Mikkelsen says. “When it came to the design of the game, it was on the artists. There were no dedicated game designers. There were no level designers. That just didn't exist in IO. Back then, the project was more driven by groups of people with different interests. There was a garage band feeling.”
Rendering crowds was a major challenge for early IO Interactive.
Hitman’s gameplay relies on NPCs reacting to the player. Getting multitudes of those NPCs to function independently without breaking the game took crafty programming that included cutting animations and other visual elements. Hardware advancements and incremental improvements to the team’s engine allowed them to circumvent the shortcomings, but even in the third game, 2004’s Hitman: Contracts, those limitations were a constant hindrance to the overall vision.
“The level I worked on for Hitman: Contracts had guard dogs in it,” Mikkelsen says. “And one day, the programmer who was doing the Japanese version called me and asked, ‘Hey, those dogs you have in your level, are they needed for gameplay?’ I asked why, and he said ‘the Japanese letters take up more space than the Western letters do, so I need more memory. Can I delete the dogs?’”
It wasn’t until 2006’s Hitman: Blood Money that the team finessed its engine to create believable, bustling spaces. The game was still much more obtuse than other big-budget titles, but at least the developers had finally achieved a core part of the formula they’d always envisioned. Now they had to tackle Hitman’s other big shortcoming: its crude controls and general jankiness. To fix these flaws, IO would have to take a big, unpopular swing to sow the seeds for Hitman’s best outing.
An Absolute Turning Point
Hitman: Absolution brought much-needed change and modernization to the franchise.
If you ask any Hitman fan which game is their least favorite, odds are good that they’ll respond with 2012’s Hitman: Absolution. Absolution threw out most of the foundation built by the first four games, which Mikkelsen calls a “product of its time.”
“We had the Grindhouse movies, we had Gears of War, and Uncharted. Those things influenced the kind of the direction we wanted to take with Absolution back then,” he says.
Linear levels replaced huge sandboxes. Disguise effectiveness was determined by a timed ability, and big setpieces replaced the more subdued action sequences of the originals. Absolution turned Hitman into a contemporary stealth-action game, and for the fans who’d waited six years for this next-generation follow-up, the disappointment was immeasurable.
Easy-to-understand contextual controls were a game-changer for Hitman.
But for all of its faults, Absolution is superior to its predecessors when it comes to playability. Sleek UI, contextual controls for environmental interaction, and improved animations, player movement, and shooting made it the most functional Hitman game ever released.
“What Absolution brought to the table was better controls, more reliable AI, and communication of what [NPCs] do and how they behave,” Mikkelsen says. “All these moments and ideas polished up. Absolution was very attentive to how the game was played, just on a pure mechanical level, and it set the stage for everything that followed.”
The award-winning puzzler Hitman Go helped IO form the visual language of the 2016 soft reboot.
With the foundation for a modern Hitman in place, the team took the lessons from Absolution to heart. They vowed never to tell the player where the action would take place, and looked internally for inspiration for their next game. Stylistically, they even looked to the obscure, award-winning puzzle spinoff, Hitman GO.
“Hitman GO went back to the clean look, where Absolution was much more dark and gritty,” Mikkelsen says. “It was full circle from where we started: with the white PC box cover, with the guy in the suit, two silver pistols, a red tie, and the very sleek design.”
Snapping Into Place
Hitman (2016) is when IO Interactive felt it could finally execute the series’ ambitious vision.
IO carried all those lessons forward into their 2016 masterpiece, Hitman, the culmination of everything the team had learned. It had all the emergent sandbox gameplay of the first four games, but it also had Absolution’s accessibility. Best of all, the technology finally matched IO’s ambition.
“2016 was the moment where we got to say ‘let’s show them what this is actually supposed to be,’” Mikkelsen says. “It delivered on the core fantasy of this living, breathing world inside the sandbox that will keep unfolding based on your interactions.”
There were some big concessions. Hitman 2016 released levels episodically, allowing IO to learn how players were approaching objectives and giving them ample time to tweak the next content drop’s design. It was a necessary evil to nail Hitman’s new feel.
As critically successful as the game was, it didn’t sell as well as publisher Square Enix had hoped. In Spring 2017, Square Enix severed ties with the developer. With a sequel already in production, IO was scrambling for funding to continue the series. The team had survived Eidos Interactive’s 2009 closure, but Mikkelsen says the split with Square was an even more terrifying shake-up.
“From the moment that we were on our own, there were a lot of decisions that were very easy to make because you didn’t have to consult anyone up above the company...”
“We went from ‘Oh my God, what do we do,’ and went into fight mode,” he says. “The horrible part about such a situation is, of course, that a lot of people got laid off, and that just sucks. Then I was asked to direct the game from that point on, and basically drive it home. You have a team that was cut in half. You had levels that were in production that had to be completed on time. It was all about how we could turn this into something where we can keep the series going.”
The team returned to their scrappy 2000s-era roots. 2018’s Hitman 2 subbed out 3D cutscenes for animated sequences and included a four-mission mini-campaign called Patient Zero. This epilogue remixed levels from Hitman 2016, helping the team stabilize production while keeping the sequel from feeling content-light. As hectic as it was, this period showed them that independence wasn’t all bad.
“From the moment that we were on our own, there were a lot of decisions that were very easy to make because you didn't have to consult anyone up above the company,” Mikkelson says. “The company could do as it wanted all of a sudden.”
The team would partner with Warner Bros. to publish Hitman 2. But by the time the third and final game in the trilogy, which Angstrom directed, IO started self-publishing its own games.
A New Era
2021’s Hitman 3 was a remarkable bookend on the series best entry ever.
By the release of 2021’s Hitman 3, it was clear that the franchise’s new era was a triumph. By releasing dozens of free content updates and making the three games forward compatible, the trilogy, now known as Hitman: World of Assassination, is widely regarded as one of the best stealth action series of all time. It’s a testament to the team’s belief in its original vision. But there’s still unfinished business at IO, which has some dream levels it wants to make a reality.
“The one thing that keeps coming up is that we want to level on a train,” Mikkelsen says. “In Hitman 3, we actually had a train mission at the end, but it's also one of the odd ones because of how linear it is. There are a bunch of locations that keep coming back up for us. A cruise ship, an airport, and an airplane. It would be very fun to try to make some of these work.”
Fitting the sandbox formula into tight, public spaces is a challenge that still intrigues the team years after Hitman 3. These ideas will likely gestate until it's time for IO to return to the series, but for now, the team is busy with the world's most famous secret agent, James Bond.
Lighting A New Way Forward
Patrick Gibson as James Bond in IO Interactive’s 007 First Light.
From the moment IO announced it was working on a 007 video game, the collaboration simply made sense.
“There’s a huge overlap in the fantasy of being Agent 47 and James Bond,” Mikkelson says. “We’ve been handed the crown jewels. I almost get goosebumps when the Aston Martin roars out of the tunnel in the trailer, and we hear the theme.”
What’s been shown of First Light so far will look familiar to Hitman fans: large, open-ended levels with endless ways of infiltrating places you’re not supposed to be. But whereas Agent 47 relies on disguises and stealth, Bond will use gadgets, cunning, a silver tongue, and, when all else fails, a trusty arsenal.
“The interesting part has been taking all the things we know how to do in Hitman and then figuring out how it works in the Bond universe—what we can add to it, and what doesn’t really work,” Mikkelsen says. “In the gameplay trailer, we have a shootout that is way beyond what we’ve done in Hitman.”
In Hitman, combat is always a last resort. Outside of a couple one-off levels in the first couple games, combat was never part of the series, even after Absolution refined it. According to IO’s own metrics, most Hitman players will restart a level if the situation sprawls into a massive shootout.
In First Light, blowing your cover simply changes the parameters of the mission, turning the game into a third-person shooter. Similarly, the addition of driving is something IO wants to get just right, as it's not carrying over from Hitman. Angstrom promised that piloting Bond’s signature Aston Martin won’t veer into ultrarealism.
“The Aston Martin handles exactly how I’d expect it to,” Angstrom said. “It’s really fun.”
25 Years Of Hitman
Over 25 years, Hitman has become one of gaming’s all-time greats.
For IO and Hitman’s 25th anniversary, Angstrom and Mikkelsen want fans to remember that they helped make this small franchise the success it is today. It was players who embraced IO’s vision for the series, even when it wasn’t fully realized.
“The coolest thing to see is when two Hitman fans meet, because they always trade these crazy stories to share about how they completed a mission, what worked for them, and what they have to try next time,” Mikkelsen says.
It’s this kind of interaction that keeps the team inspired and reflects how they view the franchise.
“The thing I hope people take away from Hitman is the ways they made the game their own,” Mikkelsen says. “Hitman is about the stories you created yourself. I hope that people understand that when they think back on the time they’ve spent in our world.”
