Hit Factory
How IO Interactive beat the odds to regain its agency
How the many trials of Hitman development have prepared IO Interactive for a multi-project future
Visiting IO Interactive’s Copenhagen headquarters, Agent 47 is a constant presence. At reception we’re greeted by a life-size model, helium balloons bobbing against its glass case, celebrating the same anniversary that has brought Edge here. Across the room, looping clips from Animal Crossing: New Horizons follow a villager whose bald head, suit and red tie make us fear for the life of Tom Nook. Even in the bathroom you can’t escape him, those cold blue eyes peering out of picture frames on every wall.
It can feel, at times, like walking around a shrine. Not that we’d blame anyone. Since the release of its debut game in 2000, IO has been synonymous with Hitman. And without Agent 47, the studio might well never have seen its 25th birthday – nor, indeed, its 20th. This is the story that CEO and co-owner Hakan Abrak is telling when he pauses for a moment, to pick up yet another effigy from the conference table – a big-headed chibi rendering of the studio’s mascot – and attempt to rub a smudge from its shiny plastic pate.
Abrak is telling us about 2006, the year he joined IO, just a few months after the release of Hitman: Blood Money. “A transformative time,” is how he remembers it. “IO was fully embracing being multi-project, making multiple games at the same time – and growing very, very fast.” While it was working on a Hitman game the entire time, Agent 47 disappeared from public view for six years, and IO gave other things a go, including the Kane & Lynch games on which Abrak got his start. Not that he has any rosetinted glasses there. “We’ve done other IPs but, let’s be honest, they haven’t stuck around like Hitman.”
Looking back on those days now, something dawns on Abrak. “I had thought about this before, but now it’s crystal clear,” he says. “We’ve kind of come back to the same place.” IO is once again preparing to put Agent 47 on the shelf, instead focusing its energies on two new games, Project 007 and Project Fantasy, being made across five countries. “We have a dream that we can be not only ‘the Hitman studio’.”
But getting back to that same place, where it can once again attempt to realise that dream, has been a long and painful journey for the studio. Within the space of a decade, it gained and lost an owner, had to shrink and grow back on three separate occasions, and found itself just weeks from bankruptcy. How it survived all that is a truly unlikely story – and one that, for Abrak at least, begins with the disastrous development of 2012’s Hitman: Absolution.
Absolution arrived right at the tail end of IO’s prior attempt to vary the kind of games it makes. With Mini Ninjas, it had attempted a family-friendly approach; with Kane & Lynch, it had gone in quite the opposite direction. Neither set the world on fire, and after another Microsoft-funded project collapsed, in 2010 the studio suffered two waves of layoffs. It was at this point that Abrak and Christian Elverdam, who would eventually buy this entire company together, stepped onto their first Hitman game.
“Absolution was a tough, tough production,” Abrak says. “The game took seven years. It was completely over budget. I was put on in the last two years, when the executive producer was let go. It was like, ‘Either we make this work or Hitman is not in Copenhagen any more’.” Those troubles can be traced back to two things, he reckons: an underestimation of the technological leap required to make an HD-era game, and a misguided attempt to break the series out of its niche. The latter was born “on one hand, of external pressure to make a more mainstream version of Hitman,” Elverdam says. (It might be worth noting at this point that IO gained a new parent company, in Square Enix, during development.) “But also maybe an internal desire to do more story-driven games.”
Either way, the project’s reference points were “Max Payne and Gears Of War,” Abrak says – and the result, as he and Elverdam joined: “It didn’t feel like Hitman. We did everything we could, literally breaking down walls in the levels to make it more open, while at the same time trying to deliver a game that, when we came on two years before launch, was
nowhere. Mechanically, the core systems, they were nowhere.” What followed, he says simply, “was two years of brutal crunch.”
And at the end of it all, those efforts were greeted with hostility from the series’ longtime fans, and a lukewarm reception from the new players it was chasing. “Over those years, whatever was hot back then had changed. People wanted open-world games,” Abrak recalls. “It was DOA.” He recalls how the release felt: “Having worked so hard, and having made people work so hard – and then that dissatisfaction, feeling that it was our fault. All that production work, all those assets… just to be thrown away.”
This moment clearly stuck with Abrak, even as he and Elverdam were moved onto an R&D incubation project. The next year they got their chance at, well, absolution with a pitch for a new Hitman game. “I called it ‘the original assassin’, because it was all about getting back to the series’ roots,” he says. Both in genre, walking back the attempts to force Agent 47 into a story-driven action game, and in the character himself.
“47 is rather elegant – or at least he used to be, before
Absolution,” Elverdam says. Later, elsewhere in the studio, we spot a heavy concept bible for ‘Hitman 5’ on a coffee table. It shows the original direction for Absolution’s story, with concept art showing 47 as a “down and out” drunk, living on the streets, with a three-legged dog for a companion. It
“WE’VE DONE OTHER IPs BUT, LET’S BE HONEST, THEY HAVEN’T STUCK AROUND LIKE HITMAN”
couldn’t stand farther apart from the man who, in 2016, would stalk into Paris Fashion Week.
They wanted to “elevate” Agent 47, which meant taking him from the streets to more luxurious environs, Elverdam explains. “He’s kind of a blank slate. The circles that Agent 47 moves in, and the targets that he is hunting, they very much define who he is.” We’re shown a pitch video from around this time, a kind of sizzle reel of cut-together movie footage. It’s all cityscapes and glass-fronted offices, stock footage of police protecting the rich from the masses, and Wall Street graphs plummeting, firmly establishing an elite who consider themselves above common law, and 47 as the great leveller. Representing the man himself, we recognise – in a perfect, accidental moment of foreshadowing – a close-up of Daniel Craig’s Bond straightening his suit. It’s easy to see flashes of the game that would eventually become 2016’s Hitman reboot. “We sent that to the studio management,” Abrak says. “And, unfortunately, it was turned down.”
“Then, some things happened at Square Enix.” Six months after Absolution’s launch, the publisher announced the game hadn’t met sales targets (some things, it seems, never change). “There was, yet again, a change in game management, and a bit of downsizing,” Abrak says. Layoffs cut the studio in half, and all other projects were cancelled to focus on the studio’s defining property. “And Chris and I were put on Hitman again.”
This time, the pitch was given the green light – and the pair started thinking about other mistakes that had been made on the previous game. “How can we make something that is more sustainable? That is just more sane?” Abrak says, returning to the feeling that so much work on Absolution was just “thrown away”. Elverdam compares this way of developing to “a nuclear submarine – you stay below the surface for many, many years, then you come up, launch the game.” He makes a missile sound effect with his mouth. “And you disappear.”
“Coming out of Absolution, we knew we didn’t want to do that any more,” Elverdam concludes. The idea was instead to make an “ever-expanding game”. Destiny had recently been revealed, while just half an hour from IO’s office, across the water in Malmö, Ubisoft Massive was attempting something similar. More than any other, though, IO’s target was the game to which the trilogy’s World Of Assassination cheekily winks. Even past its peak, Blizzard’s MMORPG monster hit was still bringing in millions of players every month. Abrak remembers telling IO’s engineers, who were understandably sceptical: “We need to build this game like an MMO.”
While the series has never quite managed to sustain a true multiplayer component, there are more parallels than you might expect. “At the end of the day, Hitman is a session-based game,” Elverdam says. “You jump into this sandbox level and you’re supposed to play it many, many times. So that’s actually, in its architecture, much closer to a multiplayer game – where you jump into, like, a Counter-Strike match and play it over and over again – than a more linear, story-based game.”
The approach was further shaped by decisions beyond IO’s control. “Square Enix had released Life Is Strange, and that was episodic, so they asked if we could we apply some of that to a triple-A game,” Abrak says. “It wasn’t a creative or technical production vision – but it could work together [with the design], so we embraced it.” Indeed, the episodic format proved a surprisingly good fit for what IO was trying to achieve, putting the spotlight on one location at a time.
Abrak, for his part, saw a business opportunity here: “The idea was, we could do a Trojan horse strategy, right?” The first episodes would be sold relatively cheap, but with all the production values you’d expect from a full-price game. “Would that be a good way of breaking the barrier of the niche and making a bigger [selling] game?” Not quite, as it turned out.
“Commercially, it was absolutely shite.” Abrak puts this down to player suspicion regarding the episodic model, and whether IO could be trusted with the series after Absolution. “I really hated hearing over and over again that IO had lost the ability to do a Hitman game after Blood Money,” he says, the frustration still evident in his voice. Even as IO managed to build that trust again, especially after the arrival of Sapienza and the game’s first Elusive Target missions, many players opted to wait for the full release, and inevitable discount. “So our Trojan horse was burned down before it even got into the castle.”
Nevertheless, the team were confident that they had succeeded in their aim of finally topping Blood Money – an assessment confirmed by the 100 Greatest Games Of Edge’s Lifetime, where it sat as the series’ sole representative at #57. “Making the right Hitman, a true Hitman game, was our redemption,” Abrak says. “We believed that we’d made the best Hitman game, and we knew that this was just the start.” He pauses. “Square Enix didn’t think so.”
Abrak stepped into the role of CEO in early 2017, after the departure of former studio head Hannes Seifert. “I didn’t even have 90 days after taking over, and then I got the call from Matsuda-san: ‘We have to divest IO’.” It was, to say the least, “a shock”.
Today, Abrak accepts that the decision was totally “reasonable” from Square Enix’s point of view. “They’d had some setbacks. Deus Ex and Tomb Raider and Hitman did not sell as they expected – and Absolution did not sell before
“OUR TROJAN HORSE WAS BURNED DOWN BEFORE IT EVEN GOT INTO THE CASTLE”