I remember clearly the first time I heard about the 2016 Hitman game. It was a soft reboot for the bald assassin, and the news came at an industry event months before the official E3 announcement. It was a casual conversation over drinks, the kind of early preview that happens often in gaming circles. A representative from Square Enix was very enthusiastic about the project.
They described a system where extra assassination targets would be sent over the internet. You would only have one chance to complete these missions. If the target escaped, they were gone forever. They mentioned getting celebrities involved, like the idea of assassinating a famous person such as Justin Bieber in a one-time event. I remember that specific example, though Bieber never actually appeared in the game. At the time, the idea felt fresh and exciting.
However, I wasn’t completely sold on the concept. My excitement for the Hitman series had been dampened by the 2012 game, Absolution. My general interest in Square Enix’s western projects was also low at that moment. If I was going to get insider information over a pint, I would have preferred hearing about the development of Final Fantasy 15 from the Tokyo team. This shows the difficult challenge Hitman 2016 faced in winning back fans.
A year later, I attended a preview event for Hitman 2016. One of the public relations staff from Square Enix was there. This person usually did a diligent job on every title, but with Hitman, their excitement was obvious. You could really tell when they were personally invested in a game. With Hitman 2016, it was clear they believed it was something special. That genuine enthusiasm sparked my interest more than the hands-on demo did. When the final game arrived, it was pure magic. It clicked instantly. Sometimes, a developer finds the perfect formula, like discovering a cheat code for fun.
It hasn’t been a smooth ride since then, obviously. Looking at the journey IO Interactive has taken is actually quite wild. The first game had a forward-thinking but messy episodic release structure. I still feel that approach hurt its sales performance. As a subsidiary of Square Enix, Hitman 2016’s results were apparently too soft. This was during a period when the publisher was retreating from the West. In a rare act of corporate kindness, IO Interactive and the Hitman franchise were sold into independence rather than being closed down or sold to a company that might ruin the series.
Hitman 2 was then published by WB Games. By the third installment, IO Interactive took the risk of full self-publishing independence. We are now five years past the release of Hitman 3, and things have changed even further. Over the last five years, Hitman 3 has transformed from the third game in a trilogy into a complete package. It has expanded with extra maps, new modes, and those limited-time assassinations. Between my first hearing about them and the game’s release, they were given the name ‘Elusive Targets’.
At what point is it acceptable to declare a game a true, bonafide all-timer? A year? Five years? Ten? I am not sure. Maybe it is all relative. I expect we all knew Super Mario 64 was an all-timer the day it came out. Breath of the Wild probably too. But in my mind, the cultural milestones of games like Rock Band, Arkham Asylum, or even Minecraft all took a while to sink in. So perhaps the timing is flexible. And of course, it is all subjective.
I digress. I think enough time has passed. As the game that eventually became 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. It certainly deserves a spot on any list of the greatest video games of all time.
The sandbox IO Interactive has built is incredible. It is video game purity in every sense. You have clockwork worlds that you can carefully learn. The ‘living’ non-player characters are perfectly pitched in their predictable, exploitable stupidity. It is unashamed, unalloyed video gaming. There are minor ambitions toward the cinematic, but never at the cost of the core formula. Each level is an intricate Rube Goldberg machine. You and Agent 47 are the invaders that mangle up the gears and send the simulation flying off in unexpected, delightful, and hugely satisfying ways.
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 like I do Balatro or the criminally underrated Dungeon Encounters. 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. Those elusive targets still keep coming with a raft of celebrity appearances. These don’t just drop a new NPC and a bit of voiceover into existing maps. They fully convert and adapt them with new visuals, mechanics, and more. The best elusive targets feel like you are playing properly messed up mods, like somebody has hacked the game. These days, they all feel like that.
All of this is also a testament 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. To be fair, much of what has been accomplished likely could not have happened 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 is what hindsight is for. Five years of hindsight tells us this: yes, it is an all-timer. Excellent work, 47.
