I can still very clearly remember the first time I was told anything about 2016’s Hitman, the soft reboot of the adventures of gaming’s most-beloved slaphead. It was at an industry event, several months before the game was due to be announced at E3 2015. It was the usual sort of ‘told about a game early’ affair. Someone from Square Enix gushed over a pint.
“It’s going to be f**king amazing,” they enthuse in my strangely clear memory of the exchange, which I paraphrase here. “It has this system where extra assassination targets are sent down over the internet, and you only get one shot at them. If they escape, they’re gone forever. We’re getting celebrities for it.
“Like, imagine you get to assassinate someone famous, like Justin Bieber, but it’s a one-time thing.” I recall that Bieber, who ultimately never appeared in Hitman, was the one on this person’s lips for whatever reason. I remember the exchange, I suppose, because it was such a novel idea. At the same time, I know I also wasn’t that fussed about what I was told. My appreciation for Hitman had been dampened by 2012’s Absolution, and my enthusiasm for Square Enix’s western slate in general was low. If someone from Square was going to get candid over a pint at that time, I wanted to hear the Final Fantasy 15 development gossip from Tokyo. This speaks to the hill that Hitman 2016 had to climb.
Fast forward a year or so and I remember going to play Hitman 2016 for a preview beat. One of Square Enix’s public relations people at the time was the sort of person who did a diligent job on every title, but also had an energy where you could really tell if they were personally excited by a game. WIth Hitman 2016, it was clear they thought this was something properly special – which in a sense ignited my enthusiasm for it more than even the hands-on did. The final game later arrives and… it was magic, right? An instant click. Sometimes, a developer happens upon the correct formula like a cheat code. They find the dopamine button in your brain and hammer it mercilessly.
It hasn’t been plain sailing, obviously. When you look at the journey IO Interactive has taken here, it’s actually sort of wild. The first game had that forward-thinking but messily-communicated episodic release structure, which I still feel kneecapped its sales performance. As a Square Enix subsidiary, Hitman 2016’s performance was apparently too soft amidst a general vibe of a retreat from the West at the publisher. In a rare instance of corporate kindness, IO and Hitman were sold into independence rather than closed or flogged to a culture-destroying third party. Hitman 2 was then published by WB Games – and by the third, IO took its shot at full self-publishing independence.
We’re now five years on from IO’s release of Hitman 3, and since then things have changed further still. Over the last five years, Hitman 3 has morphed from being the third in a trilogy to a complete trilogy package, and expanded with extra maps, modes, and of course those limited-time assassinations, which between me first hearing about them and release were given the moniker ‘Elusive Target’.
At what point is it alright to put the hammer down and declare something a true, bonafide all-timer? A year? Five? Ten? I don’t know. Maybe it’s all relative. I expect we all knew that Super Mario 64 was an all-timer just about the day it came out. Breath of the Wild too, probably? But in my mind the cultural milestone nature of Rock Band, Arkham Asylum, or even Minecraft all took a while to sink in. So perhaps the point is malleable. And, of course, it’s all subjective.
I digress. I think enough time has passed, and I think as the game that’d ultimately become the ‘complete’ World of Assassination package turns five, the earth has revolved around the sun enough times for us to have clarity and hindsight: Hitman: World of Assassination is an all-timer, and certainly should appear on any list of the greatest video games of all time.
The sandbox IO Interactive has built is incredible. It’s video game purity in every sense – the clockwork worlds which you can carefully learn, the ‘living’ NPCs that are perfectly pitched in their predictable, exploitable stupidity… it is unashamed, unalloyed video gaming. There’s minor ambitions towards the cinematic – but never at the cost of that formula where each level is an intricate Rube Goldberg machine, and you and 47 are the invader that mangles up the gears and sends the simulation flying off in unexpected, delightful, hugely satisfying ways that are as likely to be plan-breaking as affirming.
There is seldom a ‘big’, ‘triple-A’, single-player game that one can learn inside-out and replay again and again in this way. I treat Hitman as I do Balatro or the criminally underrated Dungeon Encounters (a gloriously stripped-back and refined RPG) – it is a simple yet brilliantly dense evergreen comfort blanket of a game.
And the best thing of all? God, it just keeps getting better. Freelancer mode, introduced back in 2023, is a revelation of replayability. And those elusive targets still keep coming with a raft of celebrity appearances that don’t just drop a new NPC and a bit of voiceover into existing maps, but fully convert and adapt them with new visuals, mechanics, and more. The best elusive targets feel like you’re playing properly messed up mods, like somebody has hacked the game – and these days, they all feel like that.
All of this is also a testament, I suppose, to independence. While Square Enix clearly believed in the World of Assassination vision enough to bankroll the first game, they clearly didn’t have subsequent belief to continue. IO Interactive did and has ultimately reaped the rewards – and to be fair, much of what has been accomplished likely could not have been in a larger publishing operation. The way Hitman 3 has morphed into a hub for content from all three games, for instance, and the way it continues to deliver free content five years after release, feels like the sort of forward-thinking generosity only an independent studio could manage.
The truth is also that because Hitman’s greatness accrued over time, like a snowball rolling down an ice-capped mountain, little of the launch criticism for any of the three games could truly predict how great it would become. That’s what hindsight is for. Five years of hindsight tells us this: yes, it is an all-timer. Excellent work, 47.
