Curtains Up

With Hitman’s season concluded, we join IO Interactive and delve deep into its signature stage. This is the conception and construction of Showstopper.

- Ben Griffin

Showstopper is the rebooted Hitman’s defining level. Vast, detailed, and impossibly glamorous, the first episode of 2016’s season is the perfect playground for avant-garde assassination. It all started with a single workshopped idea: Agent 47 visits a fashion show. Where, and why, were yet to be decided. Early ideas swirled around London’s Battersea Power Plant. “It was a close call,” says creative director Christian Elverdam, “but eventually that location was dropped because we wanted to go back to Paris, which felt like an iconic setting for Agent 47”. Searing style, sneering new money, and a sharply dressed assassin caught in the middle? Perfect.

From this concept Showstopper expanded: a catwalk, a packed bar for the post-show festivities, backroom staff in kitchens and basements, an antique-filled attic, even a top-secret auction for criminal moguls. The more it grew, the greater the strain on its network of intricate systems, never more than a stray piece of grit away from stalling completely. To prevent that, principal level designer Jacob Mikkelsen drew inspiration from an unlikely source: “you can pull a leg off a Terminator robot but it will still keep on crawling. a Hitman level has to do the same thing… it has to keep on trying to convey the story. For that, we had to come up with a way of doing the fashion show.” If one of Showstopper’s runway models mysteriously disappears, for example, the production doesn’t suddenly collapse.