Looking Back... Hitman: Blood Money

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He might have been last in the queue when god was dishing out hair, but Hitman's Agent 47 is one of the most ruthless assassins around - and after his fourth (and best) outing, we decided to find out more about him. After taking out a security guard and making our way into Io Interactive's offices, we cornered game designer Rasmus Hojengaard (right), held a syringe to his neck and threatened to steal his clothes to get him to explain some of the finer points behind Hitman: Blood Money. He took it surprisingly well...

1) GENESIS:
Initially, we just wanted to create a character that had a little more grittiness and edge than most of the characters you see in computer games. Then came the thought-provoking idea of trying to fulfil the fantasy of being an assassin which was a really cool thing, but on top of that it's something that's hard to admit that you think is cool because it's basically about being evil. The inspiration was from a lot of things - Hong Kong movies, comic books and all kinds of stuff.

We decided to make him a clone early on. I guess there was just something cool about him not having any roots, so by being a clone, he can be shaped into any form by the people who made him; they decide everything about his future fate, so making an assassin a clone would seem like the ultimate way to make the ultimate assassin. It evolved with the character before the first Hitman was even done.

2) GET THE PRESIDENT:
We included the White House because it hadn't been done before and it's a little unorthodox. It's something we have to be careful with because there are certain boundaries that you shouldn't cross, and also it's one of those locations that everybody has seen-but-not-seen, if you know what I mean. You've seen it 10,000 times in movies and stuff like that, but you still haven't really seen it because that's now a staging as well; it's just a set that resembles the real thing. We can build something and make people believe it and still morph it to fit into the game without anybody really noticing. So it's a really cool thing, because we can make it feel totally real, make the gameplay fun and provoke people a little with a location like that. What's more, most of the game was in the States, so doing the White House was a no-brainer.

3) THINKING OF DEATH:
When we have to think up accidental deaths, I guess we just squeeze our sick little brains and then the ideas just pop out. The people
who work on these games are very visually creative people, so when you put a bunch of people like that together, you're just going to have ideas like this swilling around; it's inevitable. The only difference between us and other people is that we can actually use these ideas. If you put a bunch of 50-year-olds together and ask them to brainstorm on crazy stuff, they're going to come up with the same things but they just don't have any concrete use for it, so it just becomes these thoughts. We can actually put it into a product and sell it, so I guess that makes the situation different more than the ideas.

4) AGENT SMITH:
It seems like we've been building up CIA Agent Smith (who you've just saved so many times that he owes you big time), so if at some point
we need somebody to help you in the game, we have this character who hasn't played a big role but who has a lot of goodwill in him, so maybe you can use him later on.

As far as I can remember, he wasn't really planned to be in the game at all because everybody hates him a little bit because he's just so lame, but he pops in there anyway. I think if we're going to use him again, we'll probably use him in a more serious way - if he's going to pop in, he'll need more gravity next time.

5) ALTERNATE ASSASSINS:
We wanted to have a really cool nemesis character for Agent 47 in this game, and Parchezzi has the goal of wanting to kill him because Agent 47 is basically what he's not. Parchezzi's a good assassin, but he has all these fatal flaws because he's an albino and is prone to cancer. We thought that making Agent 47 be hunted by him would be cool and we didn't really want to use clones in the game, so we came up with this guy. He turned out to be a really cool character; very classy, yet at the same time very mean.

We wanted to have the other assassins to keep things interesting, plus we could have duels and other stuff going on. We could have characters that defended themselves more than the normal drug dealer or similar would do. So when we made the Mardi Gras level, the Heaven and Hell party and the Christmas party, we wanted to add the worry of having other assassins there so you got a bit paranoid - plus it makes for cool targets.

6) A WORLD OF CONTRASTS:
Usually, Hitman's always been up the social scale in terms of location, with Contracts being the odd one out. For Blood Money, we wanted to do more picture-postcard locations because it just works more efficiently if you do some really cool stuff in a location that's the opposite. So if you take a peaceful suburb with sprinklers, barbecues and Martini-soaked housewives going about their business and you put a guy into a garbage truck and crush him to pieces, it's going to work a lot better than if you do it in a location such as a dark and abandoned warehouse which just screams horror. We wanted the game to be a little more hardcore too, and you can see this in the training level when you have to execute a guy who's actually begging for his life.

7) CROWDED HOUSE:
Initially, the Mardi Gras level was going to be a PlayStation 2 showcase. We wanted to see if we could do this on PS2 because at that point, everyone was hyping crowds on the next-gen consoles, so we knew that if we could get in and make a pretty decent crowd system on PS2 it would provoke a reaction. So we decided to put the crowds in, and it actually turned out a lot better than we'd hoped for. Realising it on PC and Xbox 360 is a bit of a no-brainer, but realising it on the lower-end platforms at almost the same quality was something that I'm really proud of - and I know that the same goes for a lot of the programmers who worked on this thing.

8) OUR SECRET:
I think that the easter egg with the poker-playing rats was just a crazy idea between the programmer who was setting up the gameplay and an animator. They just took these poker-playing animations and these rats that we had and said: "OK, do we have the memory for it? Yes we do." So then they added the animations to the rats. It was just a funny thing, but there's tons more stuff too people haven't found half of it.

The easter eggs are sort of like a signature for some of the people who set it up, but it's just as much for the fans to discover too. It doesn't require much on our side except for the memory resources and it doesn't require much to implement, but the people who discover them get immense gratification when they do and can't wait to tell other people, and that in itself is one of the things that's going to help people dig the franchise and really get into the series.

9) COURTING CONTROVERSY:
The controversy around the ad campaign was good - if you don't get some sort of reaction like that, you haven't made a good campaign. It's a fine line you've got to walk, but I don't think they were that horrific; when you compare them to what movies are doing nowadays, it's nothing. Most of the really horrific things came out of people's heads; for example, a lot of people applied a sexual perspective to the lady lying there dead, as in necrophilia and so on, but none of that was ever the idea of the adverts. It's totally people's minds that come up with these things and that's more worrying than the ads themselves.

10) JUST KYDDING:
I think that Blood Money's got a successful soundtrack because the man behind it, Jesper Kydd, makes a really tasteful blend of electronic and symphonic music. It doesn't become too disturbed or too subtle and it changes dynamically with the AI in the game in a way which is pretty pleasing. You don't really notice the music until you remove it and that's how it's supposed to be; I think it stresses a lot of the situations and things that you do in the game, so together with the Freedom Fighters soundtrack, it's the best soundtrack to any game we've developed.

PC Zone Staff