(keyboard clicks)
(dramatic music)
- Oh, there you are, welcome
to Copenhagen, Denmark.
Our target this time is an illusive one.
Despite being one of the
most storied developers
in all of Europe, we
know very little about
what goes on at IO Interactive,
which is especially unfortunate
considering, recent events.
IO Interactive, the creators of Hitman,
almost disappeared from existence
when their parent company Square Enix,
decided to sell them off in 2017.
And so not only would we have lost
one of the most creative
studios in Europe,
but the story of how the
company got to that point.
Our mission here is to
find out what goes on
at IO Interactive.
their corporate culture,
how they survived being dumped
by their parent company,
and ultimately, they brought Agent 47
(gun fires)
back from the dead.
In this multi-part series
we're going to dive headfirst
into the design of Hitman
and explain how the team
forged each location and the simulations
that bring them to life.
But in today's episode we're going to try
and answer many of the lingering questions
surrounding the studios
turbulent recent past.
How the break up with
Square Enix went down,
how the decision to make
Hitman 2016 episodic
caused them massive financial strain,
and how much of the team that created
perhaps the least well
remembered Hitman game,
went on to create the greatest one.
Very well then, I'll leave you to prepare.
- I vividly recall the
first day I went to work
and I, you know, that experience you get
walking in the door and going,
hey, I'm actually working here.
And I had that feeling,
back in the old office
we had this staircase,
spiral staircase in the
middle of everything
and I caught myself even years after
going up that staircase and
going, hey, I work here.
So it was, you know, to come from Denmark
it's a remarkable place to
work and obviously well known
for Hitman and the Hitman
series, absolutely.
Well there was a certain thing
with the vibe of Silent Assassin
which was mainly around I think
characterization and the feel of it
felt larger than life to me sometimes
or the way that 47 sort of
came to life as a character,
to me back then, was pretty significant.
And I think many of my sort
of in game gameplay moments,
a lot of them seem to go back
to Blood Money for me a lot.
I recall the Mardi Gras level
but this was just purely
from a visual perspective
going like, what the
hell is going on here?
It was to me, back then,
mind boggling to look at.
- [Danny] Christian is typical
of many of the leads at
IO Interactive today.
He came on after the
launch of Blood Money,
a game that was released
13 years ago in 2006.
Given the age of this franchise,
perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise
that there are only a handful
of people at the studio
who worked on Blood Money.
Even fewer who touched
Contracts or Hitman 2.
And not a single person who worked
on the studio's original title;
2000's Hitman: Codename 47.
By the time Christian
had joined the studio
it was a very different place
than the scrappy upstart
that had created some of the best
stealth-action games ever made.
The company was bought by
Eidos Interactive in 2004,
had grown substantially in headcount,
and was developing
multiple projects at once.
Including, a next generation Hitman game.
- Yeah, so my first Hitman game
was actually Hitman: Absolution.
Which is obviously a game that is
for the fans been a hot topic.
Like, what kind of game is it?
There's typically this
interesting conversation saying
it's a solid game but
it's not a Hitman game
and all these things.
And I recall back then sort of
the mission briefing if you will
of what we were trying to achieve
was to make Hitman very playable
because up until that point
stuff like basic controls
of the character,
getting the camera, getting combat,
stealth action, all that stuff,
to really just feel like you
could pick up and play the game
like you would pick up and
play any other console game
and then I think the deeper AI.
So some of the stuff that
happens in Absolution
where the AI actually spots
you, it has full voice
to actually reflect back
to you what's going on,
which is obviously a key
component of the gameplay
in a Hitman game.
- It was one of these, you
know, how to not do things.
Where you have crazy
ambition for the next Hitman
which was to top Blood
Money which, you know,
it was kind of the
pinnacle a really good game
and it think after four Hitman games.
I think the creators there
were maybe thinking to
mix things a bit up.
It was also there were,
IO was doing other things
like Mini Ninjas, some of the people
have been there a long time
and have got kids at that point
and they wanted to do something
else than killing, I guess.
- [Danny] And then Kane and Lynch.
- Yeah, so some people
wanted to kill more, I guess.
So different sides were emerging, right
and back when Absolution's
original concepts
were kind of formed it was the hay days
of Max Payne and Gears
of War kind of things
and that's where the trend was going
and that's what the
creatives wanted back then.
And that might've worked pretty well
if the technology was ready.
A lot of content creators were sitting
and waiting for technology,
technology wasn't ready,
a lot of frustrations, a
lot of finger pointing,
it was really a tough time.
It took seven years to do Absolution.
It meant the industry had moved
on to more open games again
where as the formula, the
main ingredient of Hitman,
open levels, freedom of choice,
that became kind of the thing again.
The game for the longest time
was done as a linear cinematic experience
and when we had to midst
of the project change that.
- [Danny] IO Interactive were always known
for their impressive technology.
The original Hitman was
among the first games
to have realistic physics simulations.
And the core of this technology
was the studios in-house engine, Glacier.
Hakan had began at the
studio working on Glacier
but now found himself taking over
as executive producer on Absolution.
But initial demos of the
game at E3 had not gone well.
The game was originally much
more linear and story driven.
It wasn't the Hitman game
that fans were expecting.
- We got a lot of heat for,
this doesn't feel like Hitman,
this is too linear and action packed.
We did a lot, opened
up a lot of locations,
put in targets in there
because there were no targets,
you were only killing targets
in cutscenes, not in the game.
- One of the biggest learnings
for me personally out
of Absolution was that
if you really want a Hitman experience
it has to be about the player
and his relationship to the target.
And the nature of how
you take out the target
needs to be on your terms.
It can never either be
too scripted in-game
or even worse it cannot
happen in a cinematic
or in some way where you're disengaged
or where you don't feel like
you laid all the pieces of the puzzle
and now this is your final sort of act,
that is the fascination of the game.
- We didn't feel right
at that point either
so it was a complete crunch,
it was a bit of a monster to deal with
to try to get Hitman back into Hitman,
all consuming crunch for two years.
At that point in my
professional life as well I was
relentless, everybody knew to crunch.
I remember I lived in Malmo,
that's just 30 kilometers away
so it sound like, you know,
in Sweden, another country,
but it's just a bridge
and you drive under the water in a tunnel
and there are these lights in the tunnel
that are just repeat in this
same frequence when you drive
and all of a sudden, this was when
the pinnacle of stress was hitting me,
all of a sudden the lights
were swirling like this, right,
and I had to actually stop
the car and take a minute
because I couldn't focus anymore.
And I did drive a lot of people
around me extremely hard.
Also, that was a learning
experience, right,
we make the game, extremely proud of it,
the massive costs it took
it didn't recoup well enough in time.
That was also maybe mission impossible.
- Some of that stuff was,
the fundamentals were
made in Absolution so,
again, when we then started
thinking about Hitman 2016
and sort of the new, bringing
Hitman, the sandbox game
that everyone knows and loves,
we were bringing that back,
one of the components was to say,
it needs to learn from Blood Money
and it needs to take the best
parts of Hitman: Absolution
and bring those together in a new game,
in a new format if you will.
(dramatic music)
- [Danny] The studio didn't
know what to do for a while.
Eidos had since been
acquired by Square-Enix
and so IO Interactive's new
masters were based out of Tokyo.
The studio has scaled up
over the seven year time
it took to make Absolution,
and while eventually the
game reviewed favorably,
it just didn't sell enough.
The company went through
a round of layoffs,
a new project was canceled,
and the previous studio head quit.
Hakan became Studio Production Director
and the team focused on their next goal.
The game that fans were craving,
a worthy successor to Hitman: Blood Money.
- We wanted to build the
best Hitman game ever built,
and I know that you can
say that as a cliche,
but that's what we wanted to do
and we wanted to do it
in a way where we said,
we have a fundamentally
really good game in Absolution
with the caveat that it's lacking essence,
essential parts of what
makes a great Hitman game,
and then we had our legacy
with Blood Money and the prior games
and we felt that if we
can combine these elements
into the right recipe
then we will have what
will definitively be said,
this is the best.
That was our humble goal.
It felt extremely daunting at the time
because I have, how to put it,
we had not built a sandbox in 10 years
and all the tooling, all the
everything that went into that
was in the previous engine,
the Glacier 1 engine,
so we had to invent and
reinvent a lot of stuff.
- [Danny] Hitman has always
been a community focused game.
With players on forums
sharing their strategies,
doing speedruns and
creating custom targets.
To serve this need the team
had created an online mode
in Absolution called Contracts
where players could set custom targets
and share them online.
But much to IO's surprise,
a full year after the
release of Absolution,
a year in which they had
done no post-launch support,
the game's contracts
mode was still pulling in
around 50,000 players every day.
Hardcore Hitman fans
loved exploring the depth of each level.
So what if they made the
next Hitman a foundation
that they could expand on.?
Instead of re-building
the tech for every game,
they'd create a platform,
what they referred to publicly
as the World of Assassination
was internally known as the
Netflix of Assassination.
Using this platform they'd
release levels like episodes.
So while the players explored
the depth of one level,
the team could work on new ones.
And perhaps by launching
with just a few levels,
at a lower price point
they could get more
players through the door.
Creating more positive word
of mouth about this new Hitman
that might correct the
franchise's image problem.
They'd also sell a $60
version for super-fans
who just wanted to buy into
the entire first season anyway
while making the system always online
would allow them to add new
targets and game modes for free.
So, less of a game, and more of a service.
A radical idea at the time,
and one that Hakan hoped
players would embrace.
- So the decision was at the
end let's go full Netflix
and the strategy was this,
I'm gonna be absolutely honest about this,
was that, okay we've got our
start with a starter pack,
like a low entry point.
Let's do kind of Trojan Horse strategy.
Let's get high volumes of people
paying less than 60 bucks,
high volumes, we're confident
we have an amazing game
that will convert a big portion of these
once they get a taste
because the entry point
is lower than 60 bucks.
Once they get a taste
of it they will convert
so it will be higher volumes
of Hitman sold than otherwise
of having 60 bucks as the entry point.
So a lot of this controversy started
when we would talk about this
business model, what is this?
I'm used to consuming Hitman in this way.
What is this, is this a scam?
Like, are we paying, is this
Early Access hidden, you know,
don't they have a publisher,
and stuff like that.
A lot of, you know, always
online, what the hell?
- [Danny] Did you get a lot
of those $15 people though,
did you get a lot of like--
- That's the thing.
So, we didn't, so the
strategy completely failed.
It was completely opposite.
So we had a high number, not high enough,
lower than if it was a boxed
product or the whole game,
a high number, like 80% of
people who bought the game
was people paying 60 bucks for one episode
and trusting us, even whilst
they probably were bitching,
trusting us that this is gonna be amazing
because it's IO and it's Hitman.
So 80%, we estimated that 80%
would be the low entry point
but the volumes would
be higher, much higher,
and there would only be 20%
of those paying 60 bucks.
But the percentage was, the
distribution was opposite,
it was 80% full price
and 20% only coming in.
- [Danny] And was that 80%
less than what you
would've wanted as well?
- Well the volumes were
much smaller, right,
the strategy did not work, much smaller,
and this is where the first
nervousness of Square Enix,
and we had like Hitman
2 in production as well,
massive investment in building
a whole digital platform.
We had something else in the works as well
and the team, the studio
was 180 people and we were,
had a historical catastrophic
start, commercially.
- [Danny] Reviews were
strong, players were saying
it may be the best Hitman
game they had ever made.
But it still wasn't selling.
While in the background the
studio was still working on it,
adding new maps, new Elusive Targets,
and more ways of playing the game.
The hope was that with each new level,
more players would be converted.
And that by the end of
the game's first season,
once the final version was available,
they'd see a flood of new players.
But the constant work was
starting to take its toll.
- The challenge was that we had
Bangkok, Colorado, and Hokkaido to finish
so I think you had a quite large team,
some people were very tired, right,
I mean, the massive effort
of rebooting a franchise,
reimagining a franchise and
the effort that Paris was,
I mean, it was, yeah,
insane the years of
work that went into that
and just pulling off
that level of complexity.
That was the hard part,
was just like, okay,
the pride of having
successfully rebooted this IP
but then we just had these massive maps
that we had to finish.
- The next episode was Sapienza,
this is where things started to turn,
where people were like, ah.
That there were a lot of people saying,
I acknowledge it's
amazing but I'm gonna wait
til the game is complete.
So there was always light
at the end of the tunnel
but there was always like
a, oh, shoot, they got away,
and the industry was
changing as well, right.
These price promotions and
the half, you know, (snaps)
games were coming onto
lower prices much faster,
consumers were like,
yeah, I'm just gonna wait,
I'm gonna buy the game at
half price when it's complete.
Every week there was something
and this was also one of the promises.
Every single week we would
have something for the fans.
Every week there will be something.
Challenges, escalation
missions, Elusive Target,
a new, bigger drop locations,
something every week.
- [Danny] When Season
One of Hitman finished
the game had six large levels,
dozens of Elusive Targets,
new game modes, and even full remixes
of many of the destinations.
But there was still market confusion.
Players weren't sure
what Season One meant.
Was the game not finished
until the end of season two?
And despite rave reviews,
the initial skepticism
of the release strategy
hadn't really worn off.
And so the boxed copy of Hitman 2016
didn't meet Square-Enix's
sales expectations.
So a new strategy was put in place.
To create a full sequel to Hitman 2016
that would fix these problems.
To utilize the talented, experienced team
to add new gameplay features, online modes
and even more impressive levels.
Around this time Hakan was
promoted to studio head,
but almost immediately,
the bad news followed him.
- I didn't even have my
first, what do you say,
first 100 days or 90
days or whatever you say
before I had the
conference call with Japan
and the message that
they wanted to divest,
that this couldn't continue.
Because, and this is a long story,
there are things that I don't know,
decisions, discussions with shareholders,
the background for
completely, the full picture,
I wouldn't know that but I know there's
it's announced now, the Marvel
games with Crystal Dynamics
and Eidos Montreal, I knew there was
so many big investments in those projects
so I guess commercial slow start
and after the disc as well
it didn't benchmark like that
and the running costs,
I guess there was a,
that was a big part of the
decision to cut some of the costs
and focus on the huge investment
in ambitious projects they had
between Crystal Dynamics
and Eidos Montreal
with the Marvel projects.
It was a tough message to get.
- That was kind of a crazy time, yeah,
'cause had just ramped up a lot,
we were like a lot of
people, new direction,
Blue Ocean, let's do all
these insane things and like,
let's work on these features
that we never got to do before
but now we may have the people
and the bandwidth to do it.
I was working on Patient Zero at the time
which is like the Game of the Year
and we had finished doing
the free starter pack
as far as I remember, we
did a rework of the Yacht,
and I was also pregnant at the time
so it was like extra exciting. (laughs)
I was actually sitting
working and everyone was like,
they stopped working around me
and I thought they were very noisy
and I actually ordered noise
canceling headphones from IT.
I was like, why are people so noisy today.
And then someone came down and was like,
"are you guys okay?"
I was like, "yeah, I think it's
a little noisy but I'm fine,
"what's happening?" and she's
like, "oh, you don't know?"
And Lasse was sitting next to me like,
how can you not know, it's
everywhere on the news,
like it's all over.
And then from that moment
people just started playing board games
and they just stopped working.
We were like a few people who were like,
I'm just gonna keep working
'cause I'm not sure what
else to do, this is so weird.
- I was in the US and I'd just
been on a road trip in Utah
in like Valley of the Gods
without internet for four days
and I was like, you know that
feeling where you're like,
oh, what if something crazy's gonna happen
'cause I'm not on the internet. (laughs)
Then we got back to my
friend's place and then like
my phone logged onto their WiFi
and like this message popped in
from my ex boyfriend
actually and he was like,
this Kotaku article is saying 
Square Enix dumps IO Interactive
and he was like, is this gonna affect you?
And I was like, and it was like midnight,
we'd been driving all
day and I was like, shit!
Oh my god, and I knew it
was like morning in Denmark
so I wrote Mette from, who
is a level designer here,
I was like, Mette, are you at work,
what the hell is going on?
- HR were really good at
very quickly catching it
and going, okay, now
we're gonna talk about
what's going to happen
and what the procedure is
and talking with unions
and all that stuff,
like now we're gonna, what are the rules?
'Cause we have very
specific rules in Denmark
when you fire more than, I think it's 40%,
it's a mass firing and then
specific things have to happen
in a very specific order.
- [Danny] At what stage did you realize
that you weren't one of the
people who was gonna get let go?
- That was when I didn't get an email,
like we would get an
email if you got fired
at a specific point so were
just sitting and updating.
- In the office or at home?
- In the office.
Yeah, yeah, and then people just started
getting up and leaving, like
that was, ugh, excruciating.
- [Danny] What was it like the next,
so it was all one day that happened?
- It was that one, yeah.
- [Danny] What was the next day like
when there was all this space.
- Weird and uncomfortable.
We managed to find the bright side of it
and plus all our co workers
had like a pretty sweet deal,
they just had like four
months off, full pay.
Square was super cool
also in the break up,
I was very surprised
at how they handled it,
very, very cool in the process.
So they were just like, on Facebook
sitting drinking beer, hanging out,
and they all got job
offers and jobs really fast
so that's the weird
part of this ecosystem,
that when a big company dies
tons of small companies are
born that make amazing things.
So a part of me couldn't help
being a little bit excited
on their behalves as well,
they're gonna go out there
and do really cool stuff too.
It wasn't like all bad,
it was more of the fact that you realized,
I'm not gonna see this
person again every day,
that was the hard part I think.
- [Danny] IO Interactive
was close to 200 employees
before 40% of the workforce was let go,
A time they amusingly refer to as SQEXIT.
From talking to people at the
studio it sounds like most,
if not all, of those affected
managed to find jobs in the area.
Either at Unity down the road,
Massive across the bridge in Malmo,
or somewhere else close by.
The other thing that stood out to me
from our time at the studio was
how much respect the remaining staff
seemed to have for Square Enix.
A few months prior to the breakup
we had actually interviewed
Square Enix CEO Matsuda-san
for our documentary on Final Fantasy XIV.
and even then he talked
about how much of a fan
of the Hitman franchise he was.
But away from the media both
Square Enix and IO's management
were trying to find a
new home for the studio,
and the Hitman IP.
But instead of selling
off to the highest bidder,
rather decently, Square-Enix
ensured that any deal
was to be a three-way negotiation
between all concerned parties.
- There are some other companies
that both Square Enix and
we were not interested in.
In all this process Square Enix have been
absolutely genuine, real,
empathetic, reasonable.
Because I was pouring my
heart out in terms of like,
give us this chance to
define our own destiny,
we know our franchise
best, we believe in this.
So the scenario of an
MBO, management buyout,
became a scenario we were discussing.
We ended up doing an MBO
and bought the company
and took over and have the full control,
own the company and have the,
and we got Freedom Fighters
and Hitman with us.
Mini Ninjas and Kane and Lynch was done
while it was with Square
Enix so that's with them,
that's an IP thing, but it wasn't easy
because I knew taking over
the cash flow was low,
super hard decisions needed
to be made which I had to do
and I went through with that, I mean,
almost half the studio we had to let go,
we went through a huge restructuring
closing down some of
these other activities
just focusing on Hitman,
focusing on the future of
Hitman, Hitman 2 as well.
- Yeah, that was just like,
well what are we gonna do now?
'Cause we just lost,
well not only colleagues,
we lost friends, and we're like,
these people were super
important in our process
and we know the work they
had done, amazing work
on previous Hitmans so we were just like,
how are we ever going to make
something as good as 2016
ever again, like that's not even possible.
- [Danny] Square Enix still retains
a financial stake in IO Interactive,
but that's where their
involvement begins and ends.
The deal made it possible
for the managers to buy their own company
and regain control over its future.
But the future seemed short.
Even with mass layoffs,
the company had a huge cash-flow problem.
Not only that, but the
Hitman they envisaged
was larger in scale
than the original reboot
and impossible to create
with what now remained of their staff.
Around this time only a quarter
of the game was complete.
- So we did do a lot of
descoping on the feature side.
The original dream of systemics
that would contribute to
replay, we reevaluated that.
And on the location and mission side
a lot of foundational work
had already been done.
- I think you can tell that
by the time we started building Hitman 2
it was not a question about
how do we build the sandbox,
we felt that after Hitman
2016 we had succeeded,
people play it and, you
know, wow, we did it.
It felt like we really
got to mix the parts of,
there's some vintage Blood Money stuff
with some really playable
Absolution game mechanics
and something new to create 2016
but then we could then start jamming
and figuring out new things like, hey,
what if you can't even find
your target in the beginning?
Which to us, I don't think we
would've dared pull that off
in the previous outing
but experimenting with
game mechanics like that,
there's a lot of things
where we just said,
why not go for something new?
- We did change the
scope for the other maps.
When we had SQEXIT we were planning
on five locations actually,
five large locations,
and that changed after
SQEXIT where we looked at six
and then thought we could go for
small to medium maps if you will.
Small with New Zealand,
even though real estate wise
it's the largest map we've ever made.
With Vermont we decided to do an homage
to a New Life of course which
most people picked up on.
With Vermont it was really like,
okay, we don't have much time.
We have a few people who are very clever
and who we trust very much,
we wanna focus on modularity
and systemics, go.
(laughs)
Blood Money, go.
- [Danny] The time was
ticking on the studio
and the staff could feel it.
Hakan told us that he learned
his lesson about crunch
during the Absolution days,
and the seven years since
the studio has never
entered a phase of crunch.
But he also admits that
the general level of fear
and uncertainty at this time
made it so that people were pushing
a lot harder than they should have been.
At least time time they
had an ace in their sleeve,
the platform.
All the work that had gone into creating
the World of Assassination
meant that the team
could roll out new levels
much faster than a traditional sequel.
While the general stability of the engine
made it so that they were able
to add new features to the game,
while retrofitting many of
them into the older levels.
Even with the more focused
scope of this sequel,
the company was running out of cash fast.
And while Hitman 2016 had reviewed well,
turned around public
opinion on the franchise,
and has been incredibly
well received by fans,
the reason they were in this
situation in the first place
was because it simply didn't sell.
Hakan's strategy of creating
a low entry price point
to get people through
the door hadn't worked
But there one more card they could play.
The ultimate low entry point, nothing.
- So we made the start of
the game free, the tutorial,
and we had 1.8 million
players 1st of April.
So shortly after end of
June we went from 1.8
to 5.6 million users.
And a lot of them were
converting and buying the game
so we expected this but it went like this.
- [Danny] This cashflow
allowed them to focus
on creating a Game of the
Year edition of Hitman 2016.
But it didn't feel like enough
to pack in all of the content
they created for Season One
so the team created an
entirely new bonus campaign,
Patient Zero, with remixed
the original levels
and added new targets.
- Then we did the Christmas mission,
taking Paris, redressing
it as in Christmas time,
having a Home Alone
kind of mission in there
where you could take on the
Santa Claus and teleport around
and gave like free for a
week and then you can upgrade
to the full experience and
what not and it just grew.
- [Danny] Something had changed.
The game was now selling.
It had a vocal community
telling their friends to pick it up.
And while the team had worked hard
to add content to the game all
the way through Season One,
they felt like they had much
more wind in their sails now,
and crucially, much more
cash coming through the door
to help fund the development of Hitman 2.
So what exactly was different?
Had the team finally gotten enough players
to talk about the game?
Had they changed public
opinion on the franchise?
Had games like Destiny and Warframe
finally brought mainstream acceptance
of the games-as-a-service model?
Or was it something else?
Had the near-death of IO Interactive
suddenly activated a community of players
who wanted to support the studio,
to show their love for the franchise,
and to give this new Hitman a shot?
This influx of new players
not only helped keep the studio afloat,
but it showed prospective
business partners
that there was an
audience for these games.
Soon after they secured additional funding
by signing a deal with Warner
to help publish Hitman 2.
Creating a sequel on such a small timeline
would have been impossible
for many studios,
but not only were they well versed
in the game they had created,
but crucially, for the first time ever,
the technology was already there.
This World of Assassination
platform may not have worked
as a selling point for players.
But this platform, this single executable,
helped them build new maps
and plug in new missions
much quicker than before.
Hitman 2 was developed
by a team cut in half,
in around one year and nine months.
- We released Hitman 2
back when went independent
and on cash flow,
it was so far away but getting
there was an amazing feeling
and Hitman is a trilogy,
there's a bright future,
there's this fully realization
of the whole World of Assassination
that we are looking
towards as well of doing
that the journey since
2013 to complete that
and overarching spy
story to complete that.
And the World of Assassination,
when that's complete,
it's gonna be one game
with all the locations
starting from Paris in Hitman 1
to the last location in Hitman 3,
where it's 20 plus locations.
So the ultimate globetrotting experience
that we wanted to achieve.
- The beautiful thing of mastery is
as long as creatively you
can keep sparking new ideas
then I don't think the team
will ever run out of new
and crazy ways of playing with the idea
of a target in a sandbox,
if you know what I mean.
And I don't think the formula
will grow old if you will,
I also think that's
why we can look back on
20 years of Hitman and
say, well, on some level
the essence, the nucleus of
Hitman is still the same.
Little bit like, I don't
know, pick your sport,
soccer, football, you know, whatever,
it's the same but you
can enjoy it every time
because it's fundamentally
a fun experience.
Yeah, I don't see us running out of ideas
for what could go on in
the sandbox anytime soon.
(suspenseful music)
- [Danny] It's strange to
hear about the hard times
when you visit IO today.
We've spent three years visiting
studios around the world,
and the work life balance
we saw here in Copenhagen
is remarkable by any standards.
People wandered into work at 10
after dropping their kids off at school.
Much of the studio leaves
to go home between 4 and 5.
They tend to hire exceptional young people
and give them a shot.
They like having short meetings
and just making sure the work is done.
Hakan says that the marathon
of creating a constantly-updated
game like Hitman
means that people have to take it easy.
But that doesn't mean the studio
is resting on its laurels.
Earlier this year IO Interactive
opened up a new studio across
the bridge in Malmo, Sweden.
And while much of the team is
working on new Hitman content,
and looking ahead to
the third Hitman game,
one that Hakan says may
once-again go episodic,
the majority of the studio
at least here in Copenhagen
is working on something secret,
and rather excitingly, something new.
- We are still very much independent,
we're looking into the
future with new things,
potentially new IPs, that
we might be working on,
and we've created four
original IPs from scratch,
we've always worked on and
created these characters
and worlds and what not,
it's a part of our DNA
and I'm looking forward to
bring new stuff as well,
apart from growing Hitman into the world.
(dramatic music)
(calm guitar music)
(birds chirping)
(keyboard clicks)
