Hitman | Code Like It's 198x

Early in Hitman: Codename 47 a police chief sits down to dinner in a Hong Kong restaurant, and the way to kill him comes from The Godfather. The player hides a pistol in the toilet, excuses himself from the table and comes out of the lavatory shooting. Computer Gaming World called it “a well-designed moment of recognition” that other designers should learn from. IO Interactive’s first game, released for the PC in late 2000, made the kill a puzzle: each mission is a place full of people on their own routines, and the player works out how to get close to a target through disguise, timing and patience rather than firepower. Twenty years and eight main games later, the series still works that way.

Fast facts

Developer: IO Interactive, Copenhagen.
First game: Hitman: Codename 47 (2000), for Windows PCs, published by Eidos Interactive.
Engine: IO’s own, Glacier.
Protagonist: Agent 47, a bald assassin with a bar code tattooed on the back of his head.
Music: Jesper Kyd scored the first four games.
Main series: Codename 47 (2000), Silent Assassin (2002), Contracts (2004), Blood Money (2006), Absolution (2012), then Hitman (2016), Hitman 2 (2018) and Hitman 3 (2021).

Codename 47

The game opens with 47 waking up strapped to a table and being told he is an assassin. After a short training level he is sent after mob bosses and triad leaders in Hong Kong, Colombia, Budapest and Rotterdam. Edge later reported that it was a PC game only because PlayStation technology “wasn’t able to support IO’s ideas at the time”. The character arrived almost fully formed: IO’s managing director, Janos Flösser, showed Edge early sketches of 47 with the bald head, bar code and red tie.

PC Zone’s Paul Presley gave it an award for excellence. “Disguises play an important role,” he wrote, “and there is nothing quite as classy as initiating a gunfight, switching clothes, then strolling casually away while bodyguards and henchmen run around like headless chickens.” He also found it “perhaps the first game in history to actually make me feel a bit uneasy about my actions”, describing a guard garrotted from behind, “his limbs flailing in a macabre dance of death”, before 47 drags the body out of sight.

Others were harder on it. Every mission had to be finished without saving. Computer Gaming World called the missing in-mission save “an oversight that nobody designing an action game should make”, and mocked guards who ignored a six-foot bald man with a bar code on his head as long as he wore their uniform. Edge found “an original premise… let down by poor level design and clumsy controls”. PC Gamer gave it 54 per cent. When a reader wrote in to defend the game in December 2001, the reviewer replied that Hitman “doesn’t require stealth - it requires powers of premonition worthy of a professional psychic”. Flösser admitted in 2004 that “we took a beating on the control issue”.

Bodies that fall

The deaths that unsettled Presley came from a physics system written for the game. Thomas Jakobsen, who wrote it at IO, explained it in a paper, “Advanced Character Physics”, which he presented at the Game Developers Conference in 2001. The physics in Codename 47 moved cloth and plants and made “dead human bodies fall in unique ways depending on where they were hit, fully interacting with the environment”. Each corpse was a stick figure: points joined by fixed-length constraints, with limits on how joints could bend and extra constraints to stop the knees passing through each other. To knock a body back, the code moved the struck point, such as the shoulder, and let the simulation work out the rest. Jakobsen wrote that the methods were “integrated in IO’s in-house game engine Glacier”.

This is the technique later called ragdoll physics. Hitman shipped it two years before Unreal Tournament 2003, the game Edge named in 2005 as the first attempt at ragdoll characters. Players noticed at the time. A PC Gamer reader wrote in 2001 that “the skeletal animation and physics are the best yet seen in any game of its type” and credited “the superb Glacier engine”.

Silent Assassin to Blood Money

Hitman 2: Silent Assassin (2002) moved to consoles as well as the PC, fixed the controls, and in Flösser’s words sold “over three million copies” by 2004. For its score IO hired the Budapest Symphony Orchestra. Its end-of-mission ranking gave the series its best-known challenge. Steven Poole wrote in Edge that the game treats killing everyone as a valid way to play, but “holds out a carrot for those who wish to refine their skills and withhold their violence sufficiently to receive the Silent Assassin rating”, and the player can wander between “the twin poles of kill-everything-that-moves and take-down-only-the-target”. The game also caused offence: a level set in a Sikh temple drew complaints from the Sikh Coalition, and in November 2002 Eidos and IO agreed to remove the material from the game’s website and to change the GameCube version and, where possible, existing copies.

Hitman: Contracts (2004) framed its missions as the flashbacks of a badly wounded 47, and Hyper complained that most of them were “lifted from the first Hitman game”. It won Kyd a BAFTA for its music. Hitman: Blood Money (2006) added the ideas later games kept. Edge noted that “‘accident’ kills are now a full-fleshed feature, allowing the environment to be trap-rigged”, and that 47 could now be caught on CCTV. Cash from missions could be spent to lower 47’s “notoriety”, a reputation system Edge found “seemingly confusing and futile”, and each mission ended with a breakdown of noise, violence and notoriety. “For those who play the Hitman games with an eye for macabre slapstick and a maniac’s mischief,” Edge concluded, “Blood Money is the series’ highlight.”

Absolution and the World of Assassination

Six years passed before the next game. Hitman: Absolution (2012), built on IO’s new Glacier 2 engine, gave 47 a cover system and an “Instinct” mode, and its director Tore Blystad told Edge that the team wanted “the player to feel like the ultimate assassin and not just have the fantasy on the box cover”. Kyd did not score it.

IO then went back to large open levels. Hitman (2016) came out in episodes, one location at a time; Wireframe judged that “an episodic approach to Hitman worked in its favour”. By Hitman 2 (2018) IO had bought itself out of Square Enix, and Warner Bros. published the game. IO published Hitman 3 (2021) itself. Wireframe called the trilogy “the most consistently creative stealth-puzzle hybrid series of the decade”. In January 2023 IO renamed Hitman 3 as Hitman: World of Assassination, a single game that gives access to the locations of all three.

Sources

Paul Presley, Hitman: Codename 47 review, PC Zone issue 98, January 2001, pp. 78–79: the settings, disguises, the garrotte, the missing save, the award for excellence. PC Zone issue 97, Christmas 2000: Eidos advertisement for Hitman: Codename 47, “Developed by IO-Interactive”.
Hitman: Codename 47 review, Computer Gaming World issue 200, March 2001: the restaurant mission, the “skeletal animation system”, the missing in-mission save and the guards.
Hitman review, Edge issue 93, January 2001: “let down by poor level design and clumsy controls”.
PC Gamer (UK) issue 103, December 2001, p. 113, readers’ reviews: a reader on “the superb Glacier engine” and the physics; the reviewer’s reply; the original review in issue 91 at 54 per cent.
“The hitman and him”, profile of IO Interactive and Janos Flösser, Edge issue 135, April 2004, pp. 61–65: the PC decision, the early sketches of 47, “we took a beating on the control issue”, the reworked controls and console focus of Hitman 2, its sales of “over three million copies”, and the flashback structure of Contracts.
Thomas Jakobsen, “Advanced Character Physics”, IO Interactive (web): the physics of Codename 47, the stick-figure corpses and the Glacier engine. Its presentation at the Game Developers Conference, San Jose, March 2001, is recorded in the conference proceedings and the talk’s slides (web, secondary). https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15462-s13/www/lec_slides/Jakobsen.pdf
“Getting into character”, Edge issue 149, May 2005: Unreal Tournament 2003 as “the first attempt” at physics-driven ragdoll characters.
Steven Poole, “Trigger Happy” column, Edge issue 120, February 2003, p. 24: the Silent Assassin rating and the Sikh controversy.
The Register, “Eidos settles Hitman Sikh dispute”, 13 November 2002 (web, secondary): the agreement with the Sikh Coalition. https://www.theregister.com/2002/11/13/eidos_settles_hitman_sikh_dispute/
Eliot Fish, Hitman: Contracts review, Hyper issue 129, July 2004: missions “lifted from the first Hitman game”.
Hitman: Blood Money review, Edge issue 164, July 2006, pp. 78–80: accidents, CCTV, notoriety and the series’ “highlight”.
Hitman: Absolution feature, Edge issue 229, July 2011, pp. 70–71: Glacier 2, the cover system, Instinct and Blystad; Kyd not scoring the game. Edge issue 247, December 2012: Hitman: Absolution review.
Adam Barnes, Hitman 2 review, Wireframe issue 3, November 2018, p. 56: the episodic approach; Warner Bros. as publisher.
Nic Reuben, Hitman 3 review, Wireframe issue 48, February 2021, p. 98: IO Interactive as publisher; “the most consistently creative stealth-puzzle hybrid series of the decade”.
IO Interactive, “HITMAN 3 to become World of Assassination”, January 2023 (web). https://ioi.dk/hitman/news/2023/hitman-3-to-become-world-of-assassination
Matthias Sundström, “A Symphony of Shadows”, interview with Jesper Kyd, Wireframe issue 23, September 2019, pp. 18–22: the scores for Codename 47, Silent Assassin and Blood Money.