Killing Them Softly: The Hitman Story, Part 2

Smell is not a sense catered to by video games. It’s perhaps just as well; most of us get by just fine without having the funk of a freshly evacuated bowel mixed with the sting of fresh cordite wafting into our loungerooms out of our video games.

Every now and then, however, comes a scene so vivid you can almost smell it. A morbidly obese man reclines on a bed in a private room inside a grimy, slaughterhouse.

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The disgusting image paints a portrait even your nose can imagine.

The disgusting image paints a portrait even your nose can imagine: a foul cocktail of body odour and expired offal.

Scotsman Campbell Sturrock, ‘The Meat King’ of Romania, runs the country’s largest meat packing plant with his brother Malcolm. Together they’re responsible for the kidnap, torture and murder of a girl; a girl whose father has enlisted the services of Agent 47 to find and avenge.

The Hitman games often make you feel like you’re doing the universe a favour, snuffing out villains, miscreants and undesirables. In the case of Campbell Sturrock, however, you also feel like you’re doing him a favour. A hulking mound of fat and flesh, Sturrock doesn’t look like he has enough energy to get out of his own way.

He’s definitely better off dead.

“Meat King's party will always be my favourite level,” says Tore Blystad, game director on the recent Hitman: Absolution and art director on fan-favourite Hitman: Blood Money. “It's really gritty and mature and I had never seen anything like it in a game at the time, that was back in 2004.”

Hitman: Contracts is a curious case. Wedged between Silent Assassin and Blood Money, Hitman: Contracts came about when it was clear the team could not complete the sequel they had planned in time. Research had indicated to IO that less than 10 per cent of Hitman 2's audience had actually played the PC-only original, so the solution was Contracts; a Hitman 2.5 that would mix re-crafted content from Codename 47 with new material.

It was a solution that had to come fast.

Art from the Meat King's factory.

“It might sound a bit odd, but we created Hitman: Contracts in only nine months, from design brainstorm to console submission,” says Jacob Andersen, game director on Hitman: Contracts. “I think that was quite an achievement.”

“We used a sort-of decentralised production principle where we created small groups consisting of a few artists and programmers. Then we gave them a rough design of a few of the missions and they then did the rest pretty much by themselves.

“Obviously some parts had to be tweaked and polished but overall it worked very well. It was a hard project but people were really happy.”

Contracts was not as well-received as its predecessor, although it did find plenty of fans. Jesper Kyd’s darker score was even awarded the title of ‘Best Original Music’ at the 2005 BAFTA Games Awards.

“Contracts got made in a very short time and as such did not have much time to improve on the features of Silent Assassin,” says Blystad.

"The team was basically in crunch from the beginning to the end of the project,” he reflects, before Andersen relays an anecdote about how he and co-worker Rasmus Kjær locked themselves in the IO basement five weeks out from submission and started polishing the game “from the beginning to how-far-we-could-get-before-submission.”“It does have its own, dark style that sets it apart in the series, but both Silent Assassin and Blood Money had a longer preproduction and more time to iterate on the design.”

Source : ign[dot]com