Welcome to another Community Submission Spotlight!
Today we’re diving into a thoughtful, razor-sharp defence of a true classic:
Hitman: Codename 47.
Written with both nostalgia and critique, this piece unpacks what made the original Hitman so fascinating, messy, and unforgettable.
It’s not just a review; it’s a love letter to Agent 47’s origins, viewed through the lens of novels, fantasy, and the gritty underworld of professional killers.
I probably read Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal at slightly too young an age.
The novel’s protagonist, a skilled assassin, takes on a master project, whose completion he pursues with icy intelligence and ruthless purpose: coldly disposing of those who, having crossed his path closely enough to compromise him, swiftly outlive their passing usefulness.
Deception is how he evades pursuit, while disguise lets him approach his target – carrying a cunningly-concealed custom-skeletonised sniper rifle.
It was, at the time, the coolest thing I’d ever read.
Similarly, I all-too-soon got my tender hands on Robert Ludlum’s Bourne Identity series, about a man who, robbed of his memory by traumatic injury, gradually reconstructs a jagged portrait of himself as a violently competent professional killer.
Whereas the Jackal, a connoisseur of the finer things in life made purchasable by dealing well-remunerated death, aims to secure sufficient funds to live well for the rest of his days, Bourne literally claws to survive at all – Ludlum’s story being altogether more brutal.
Both characters, though, are fascinating in the confidence and capability with which they transgress: taking what they want, and leaving those who try to stop them in ruins, so presenting an intoxicating escape from the rule-bound ordinary world.
The implicit fantasy is clear: faced with the vagaries of an oft-discourteous society, one doesn’t simply lash out, but lands a precise and hidden strike upon the offender, who is not long for this world.
Indeed, at the core of violent fantasy is the projected ability to confront and dispatch a rival.
In The Great Gatsby, for example, rumour states that the titular character has killed a man, thus infusing the already enigmatic Gatsby with an air of lethal potential whose dangerousness enhances his mystique.
After all, taking a life breaks the Ten Commandments’ prohibition of killing, such that fatal acts, especially those which reshape the world by removing particular people from it, amount to no less than playing God.
All that to say: as slews of murderous true-crime programmes attest, killers are interesting.
Reading novels about them was quite formative. I wasn’t a Tolkien kid or a Harry Potter geek. Instead, I was taken with significantly more chilling material.
Avada Kedavra.
Thus, my interior fantasy world was shaped like an empty goblet awaiting its fill, and into it flowed the beautiful blood-red wine of Hitman: Codename 47.
The initial training level promised everything: close combat with vicious cutlery, alongside brutal kills using piano wire; a deadly wealth of firearms that spanned basic handguns to briefcase-carried sniper rifles; use of disguises to bypass security like a shark gliding past a dark aquarium window; and, as their sum, entry into the world of assassins and assassination.
Such was the promise, and Codename 47 delivered.
From its first level, I clicked with the game, which didn’t hold one’s hand. Memorise target, select equipment: go – with no suggestion as to where, or how.
Still, having played the truly soul-breaking games of the ’80s, which would allow one to progress for hours despite having left behind some unremarkable object without which progress would ultimately become impossible, Hitman’s levels were simply open invitations to wreak deadly purpose however one saw fit.
The game’s only rules were that civilian deaths would bring (financial) penalties, while killing police officers invited greater sanction.
That was all. Figure it out; go forth, and execute.
I was in heaven.
As such, I’m almost certainly too willing to excuse or to explain the game’s shortcomings.
For example, in the Colombian jungle levels, alerted enemies have a habit of opening fire from beyond the clipping plane, such that tracer rounds simply whistle out of the foliage.
Flawed? Sure – but arguably not an unrealistic representation of jungle combat, in which, as the saying goes, the bush fired at us, and we fired back.
Similarly, while attempting to dispense with nostalgia, I claim that the game’s graphics hold up precisely because Codename 47 was never beautiful.
Atmospherically, we’re in the gritty, violent underworld of Ludlum, not the rarefied, silk-turtleneck surrounds of some deadly gentleman.
Insofar as remuneration signals status, it’s interesting to note that, in the early missions, Agent 47 barely clears five dollar-figures for each lethal performance: a cut-rate killer in a world where life is cheap.
Said missions are simple, straightforward murders – the game not much caring whether a target is dispatched by silent garotte, single sniper-shot, or sent ragdoll-sprawling by half a magazine of fully-automatic fire from an unsilenced Uzi.
Even as later levels grow in size and complexity, navigating them is truly up to you, which is to say: there’s no penalty for ‘going loud’ in a notional stealth game – meaning, in turn, that this isn’t strictly a stealth title, but rather one where remaining covert avoids bringing scores of armed enemies bearing down.
Therefore, as regards covertness versus violence, one’s constrained by the in-world consequences of one’s actions, not the extrinsic judgements of some outside adjudicator.
Emblematic of this freedom is the fact that, in Codename, Agent 47’s loosened tie is taken down. He’s a sharp killer, not a puritanical dandy, and all that matters is getting the job done.
By contrast, Hitman 2: Silent Assassin has a title that betrays an agenda.
For this second instalment, 47 does his tie up tight and, after each level, gets graded against criteria whereby stealth is supreme, and aggression abhorrent – the holy grail being a Silent Assassin rating, which unlocks otherwise-inaccessible weapons.
For me, this post-mortem performance review breaks quite a lot, because, apart from railroading one entirely to one side of the stealth-action spectrum, it assumes the existence of some Bureau of Assassins’ Professional Standards: a clipboard-toting presence that tut-tuts over the minutiae of how one performed murder.
And did you fire one bullet, or two, into the target’s head? Two? Hmmm. Well, I hope you’ll go away and think about what you’ve done…
Riddikulus.
Thus starts a trend, played out in the later games, whereby 47 shifts: from gritty hired killer, to polished international agent – the sort of jet-set assassin largely inspired, I imagine, by The Day of the Jackal.
That is, from a rough, tactile, character, to the sort of romanticised freelance ‘professional’ who simply does not exist (saying which does not deny the existence of political killings by state agents, nor the reality of the gangland sicario, or local inkabi, to say nothing of the fact that murder can be suborned by finding some washed-up goon who, in exchange for a wad of cash, is willing to moonlight as a trigger-man, and perhaps even to inhume the resulting corpse).
Differently put, we’re moving away from the underworld of hitmen and aspiring to be something like James Bond.
That said, is James Bond really a spy or an assassin? After all, 007 is iconically licensed to kill, and any ancillary spying is typically in service of tracing the villain he’s to dispose of.
For a fuller discussion, see Roger Pauly’s “A Licensed Troubleshooter”: James Bond as Assassin, but suffice to say, just as James Bond morphs into more of a hitman, Agent 47 becomes more like 007 – which, incidentally, is not necessarily a bad thing.
Indeed, by the time the series’ titles reboot with 2016’s Hitman, thus beginning the World of Assassination trilogy, the offered gaming experience isn’t just good: it’s great.
Graphics are gorgeous, environments are glorious, and targets are dispatched in ways so diabolical as to set one cackling with evil glee; most of all, whether dumping a mark’s undiscovered corpse inro a freezer, or triggering a loud fatality that sets security haring about in futile attempts to trace the responsible agent, one simply melts away, bearing the deliciously sinful knowledge at the core of every Hitman experience.
It was me.
And that’s the beauty of community writing: every perspective brings something unique, passionate, and deeply personal to gaming’s ongoing conversation.
If you’ve got a story, a defence, or even a rant about the games that shaped you, we’d love to see it on our Discord.
Who knows? Your piece might be the next to take centre stage here.
About Matt:
A creaking creature from the medieval days of Counter Strike 1.6 and DoTA 1, to say nothing of an embarrassing familiarity with truly Jurassic MS DOS, Matt Burke is an aspiring writer who pens thoughts of varied content and staggeringly little value.
