I still 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 the usual kind of early preview, with a developer from the publisher talking excitedly over a drink.
They told me it was going to be incredible. They described a system where extra assassination targets would be sent over the internet, and players would only have one chance to take them out. If the target escaped, they were gone forever. They even mentioned getting celebrities involved.
They talked about the idea of assassinating a famous person like Justin Bieber, but only as a one-time event. I remember that specific example, even though Bieber never actually appeared in the game. I recall the conversation because the concept felt so new. At the same time, I wasn’t overly excited by what I heard. My enjoyment of the Hitman series had been hurt by the 2012 game, Absolution, and I wasn’t very enthusiastic about the publisher’s other projects at the time. If a developer was going to share gossip over a drink, I wanted to hear about the development of Final Fantasy 15 in Tokyo. This shows just how difficult the path was for Hitman 2016.
A year later, I went to play Hitman 2016 for a preview. One of the public relations people at the time was the type who worked hard on every game, but you could really tell when they were personally excited. With Hitman 2016, it was obvious they thought it was something special. That genuine excitement actually got me more interested than playing the game itself did. When the final game arrived later, it was pure magic. It clicked instantly. Sometimes, a developer finds the perfect formula by accident. They discover the button in your brain that releases excitement and press it over and over.
It hasn’t been an easy journey, obviously. Looking at the path IO Interactive has taken, it feels wild. The first game had a forward-thinking but confusing episodic release plan, which I believe hurt its sales. As a subsidiary of Square Enix, Hitman 2016’s performance was considered too weak during a time when the publisher was pulling back from Western development. In a rare act of corporate kindness, IO and Hitman were sold off to become independent rather than being closed down or sold to a company that might ruin the series. Hitman 2 by WB Games was published by Warner Bros, and by the third game, IO took the risk of self-publishing to gain full independence.
We are now five years away from IO’s release of Hitman 3, and things have changed even more since then. Over the last five years, Hitman 3 has transformed from the third part of a trilogy into a complete package. It has expanded with new maps, new modes, and those limited-time assassinations, which were given the name ‘Elusive Targets’ by the time the game was released.
When is it okay to stop and declare something a true, timeless classic? After one year? Five? Ten? I don’t know. Maybe it’s all relative. I think we all knew Super Mario 64 was a classic the day it came out. Probably Breath of the Wild too? But in my mind, the cultural impact of games like Rock Band, Arkham Asylum, or even Minecraft took a while to settle in. So perhaps the timing is flexible. And of course, it’s 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 circled the sun enough times for us to have clarity: Hitman: World of Assassination is a timeless classic, and it certainly belongs on any list of the greatest video games of all time.
The sandbox world IO Interactive built is incredible. It is video game purity in every sense. You have clockwork worlds that you can learn carefully, and ‘living’ non-player characters that are perfectly designed in their predictable, exploitable behavior. It is unashamed, pure gaming. There are small ambitions toward the cinematic, but never at the cost of the formula where each level is an intricate machine. You and Agent 47 are the invaders who mess up the gears and send the simulation flying in unexpected, delightful, and satisfying ways.
There are very few ‘big’, triple-A, single-player games that you can learn inside-out and replay again and again like this. I treat Hitman the same way I treat 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? It just keeps getting better. Freelancer mode, introduced in 2023, is a revelation for replayability. And those elusive targets still keep coming with a stream of celebrity appearances. These don’t just drop a new character and a bit of voice acting into existing maps; they fully convert and adapt them with new visuals and mechanics. 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 fund the first game, they clearly didn’t have the belief to continue with it. IO Interactive did, and they have 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 a 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.
