LIVE: Eminem vs. Slim Shady mission

IO Interactive has had some big things to celebrate this fall, from The Game Award nomination for its much-anticipated James Bond game “007 First Light” to the 25th anniversary of its “Hitman” franchise last month to the Monday release of its “Hitman: World of Assassination” in-game collaboration with Eminem.

And there’s much more to come for IO Interactive, with “007 First Light” slated for a March 2026 release, “Hitman” co-op mode on the horizon and a new franchise, currently referred to internally as “Project Fantasy,” in the works.

“We’ve created other original IPs from the ground up — ‘Bond’ is actually the only external, licensed IP that we’re working on,” IO Interactive CEO Hakan Abrak told Variety last week. “And I would say that’s probably the only IP we will work on externally that is not ours. Somehow, it kind of made sense after 25 years of rehearsing for the agent fantasy and doing ‘007.’ That was a match made in heaven, you could say. But there’s no doubt ‘Hitman’ has been our flagship game, our long love for all the time IO Interactive has existed.”

Since 2021, that love has been focused on “Hitman: World of Assassination,” the most recent game in the franchise, which began with “Hitman: Codename 47” in 2000. “WOA” (originally titled “Hitman 3” before its rebranding in 2023) is the third installment in the modern-day “Hitman” lineup, which launched with “Hitman” in 2016 and was followed by “Hitman 2” in 2018 — but Abrak says it won’t be the last.

“So of course there will be more ‘Hitman,’” Abrak confirmed. “But right now, I think we need to get to the other side of this year and next year you’ll get more news about ‘Hitman’ co-op, because I think co-op is a really, really good extension to the universe, and will introduce very interesting mechanics and combinations in ‘World of Assassination.’ But we will, after that, be talking about the next ‘Hitman’ — because, of course, there’s going to be a next ‘Hitman.’”

There’s a lot of opinions throughout the gaming community about what “Hitman 4” should look like, with plenty of gamers ready to tell you which “Hitman” games they love and loathe. But lead level designer Jacob Mikkelsen says he doesn’t regret anything they’ve done so far, instead citing how that work has built on itself over time, even giving them inspiration for “007 First Light.”

“Actually, I don’t want to go back and change anything,” Mikkelsen said. “I think ‘Absolution’ is, of course, the one that stands out as being different. But ‘Absolution’ was a product of its time in so many ways, and we wanted to try something with a story that drove things more than what we saw in the previous games. And then we wanted to experiment with a different format of the gameplay. But that in itself, then led to, OK, now we know how to do better mechanics, better AI, better controls, better camera, better shooting, better on a lot of things. And then, when we paired that with the sandbox mentality for ‘Blood Money,’ together they made up this new foundation that we could work on. So I don’t think I would change anything. And then also, looking back for so many years, and all the way back to ‘Contracts’ — gaming was just different back in 2003. It was much more underground and nowadays, everybody is gaming on everything.”

On Monday, Eminem enters the “World of Assassination” with a limited-time Elusive Target mission in the “Hitman” game, where he commissions the iconic Agent 47 to eliminate the singer’s alter ego, Slim Shady. The in-game event is the latest in a string of popular Elusive Target missions that have brought celebrities, like Bruce Lee, and fictional characters, Mads Mikkelsen’s Bond villain Le Chiffre, into “WOA.”

“I think we have a fairly free range because of the nature of the game. We create this Rube-Goldberg mission with so many options,” IO Interactive chief creative officer Christian Elverdam said of how the developer approaches its Elusive Target offering. “And so I think that gives us an enormous amount of of potential of things that can emerge and it allows us to be quite playful with what goes on in those targets. Like, creating a martial arts tournament and having Bruce Lee partake in, in some ways it’s nuts, right? Like, how would you do that? But it’s the nature of how we built the game, we built technology and architecture that makes it relatively easy for us to change parts of a location, and of all the stuff we set up without changing the whole. Because we can do that and we have all these onion rings and layers of gameplay, it’s more like, we don’t have to rewrite everything; every new target is kind of a drop in the ocean, and you can see all the ripples.”

How was it working with Eminem for this Elusive Target mission? “One of the really, really cool things about Eminem as an artist is that he has these stories in his albums and his career, his alter egos and these things he creates. And it was super, super fitting when we got to agree on working with him that this would fit really well to the “World of Assassination” and “Hitman.” He’s killing Slim Shady, his old alter ego. So it just makes that storyline compatible with something in “Hitman,” where the theme and everything fits really well. It was a good combination and creative decision and he was just on it. He was very interested and very cool to work with on this. I hope people will love the story. The mission and story in it is pretty cool. Everything from the music and his performance, to the team’s take on the mission, I think it’s really fantastic.” said Hakan Abrak.

You can watch the live mission below: