Hitman: Codename 47

aka: Hitman: Pagato per Uccidere, Hitman: Tueur Ă  gages
Moby ID: 2797
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Description official descriptions

A third-person shooter that emphasizes stealth and tactical thinking, Hitman: Codename 47 is a mixture of action and puzzle gaming.

You play the mysterious, nameless Hitman, whose perfectly lean body and UPC-stamped head indicate a somewhat unnatural childhood. Waking up one day in a cell, you escape your imprisonment and are shortly contacted by the Agency, an organization as mysterious as yourself. Offering a job in what you do best (delivering death), you embark on a career as an assassin. But the shadow of your past creeps up on you...and the last thing an assassin needs is something creeping on him.

A 3D game done nearly entirely from the third person (first person is used for aiming certain weapons), Hitman may initially draw comparisons to the Tomb Raider series. Although you can play in such a mode, there is also another mode where the mouse is more free to roam. Reflections, muzzle flashes, bodies that obey physics and slump and fall when necessary, and impressive shadows attempt to make the world feel realistic.

A wide array of weaponry are available, from knives and piano wire to silenced pistols to sub-machine guns and even heavy machine guns. Although such weapons are available, stealth will be your friend. The A.I. reacts to shouts, gunfire, and other odd occurrences, sometimes even getting suspicious if you're running around and so silence and sneakiness are your two best allies. Take down lone guards, hide their bodies and steal their uniforms. Then move in closer to your kill. Multiple methods of completing most of the levels are available, although one or two are the most efficient and therefore earn you the most money.

Spellings

  • Hitman: Агент 47 - Russian spelling
  • 终极刺客: 代号47 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

110 People (98 developers, 12 thanks) · View all

Product Marketing Lead
Product Manager
Creative Manager
PR
Localisation Manager
QA-Manager
Tester
Translation
Special Thanks
  • Aloha Hermann! Thanks for your support!
Programming
Additional Programming
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 78% (based on 47 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.6 out of 5 (based on 108 ratings with 10 reviews)

A new quality of aggression.

The Good
MobyGames’ rigid review structure is sometimes annoying. ;-) Please start reading below…

The Bad
Avid computer gamers mustn’t be oversensitive. We’re used to a fair amount of violence in our favourite hobby. We’re well aware that “problem-solving” often involves a machine gun. Although we wouldn’t admit it in public, we’re proud to define progress by the number of limbs that can severed from a digital human body. With technology came realism, with realism came gore, you know it, what’s the big deal? Indeed, what’s so special about a game like Hitman? A game that isn’t exceptionally gory, in which not a single limb can be severed? It’s the single fact that Hitman declares cold-blooded, insidious murder an acceptable subject for home entertainment, with a realistic directness never known before. It’s the disturbing certainty that modern entertainment has breached the last boundaries, those of morality as well as simply those of taste. And it’s the alarming realisation that we don’t care.

We should care. Not because of a new-found conscience or a sudden prudery, but because the ever-increasing tide of violence threatens to wash away our common sense. The alarm bells are ringing: Hitman introduces a new quality of aggression.
What discriminates the game from the Counter-Strikes and Soldier of Fortunes of this world is the perfidy. The hitman does not react to hostility, he anticipates it. His victims are not his enemies. In any given 3D action game, your choice in a hostile world is to defend yourself or die. However poor this justification may be, it is still somewhat reasonable – call it self defence, call it second degree murder. In normal 3D action games, you react. In Hitman, you act.
The world of Hitman is peaceful. The one who starts the bloodshed is you. You have to take the initiative, attack without having been provoked, backstab unsuspecting humans. Cowardice is a virtue in Hitman, and so is unscrupulousness: you have to kill innocents – passers-by! – to prevent them from alarming the guards. What’s worse, and what discriminates Hitman from all those related movies from “Léon” to “Assassins” is that the game has no critical undertone whatsoever. In Hitman, killing is an end in itself, and a fun one at that. The perversity is the complete absence of alternatives – you have to KILL, there are really no other options, not even to knock someone out. This gives your actions a gruesome logic: the previous murder justifies the next one. Those are the lessons that Hitman teaches, and believe me, you’re going to learn them quickly.

But hey, it’s only digital! We’ve heard all that fuss about violence hundreds of times before, it’s only the scaremongering of the ignorant. Yes, possibly. But it’s not that we gamers are blessed with immunity against ignorance, especially when our hobby is criticised. We know nothing about the influence of the media on personality, but that doesn’t prevent us from having a conviction: we are sure that computer games do not reinforce aggression in kids. After all, we’re the best examples for this thesis, aren’t we? Even if we suspect deep down that our confidence is one third optimism and two thirds indifference, we prefer to cry out: Heck, what’s wrong with wanting to have some fun? And we certainly insist on our right to decide for ourselves whether violence means fun for us or not. Entertainment is our ultimate justification.

So what’s the problem with Hitman? Is it about morality, that outdated value? No, it isn’t. It’s about responsibility. The responsibility of the developers for their target group, which simply cannot be denied. To propagate violence without a though about the consequences is blatantly ignorant. But there’s also the responsibility of us, the gamers, for our hobby. When the uninformed public, prodded by the yellow press, looks at computer games, they notice a Hitman. They notice the blood, the violence, the killing. You know all too well which judgements are formed on the basis of such impressions. If we justify games like Hitman, we gather voluntarily in our niche as a blood-thirsty minority. We are doing ourselves no favour with that. The gaming scene is grown-up enough to accept its responsibility for itself. We should declare Hitman as what it is: the ill-considered perversion of a game.

The Bottom Line
Do we really need a murder simulation to have fun? I for one don’t.

Windows · by -Chris (7762) · 2000

Awesome game

The Good
Hitman: Codename 47 is one of the best games I've ever played. I loved everything about this game. The storyline was excellent, as was the level design. Also, there were many costumes you could steal, complete freedom!

The Bad
The graphics were a little too blocky for my liking. They could have improved them a bit, since this game was released in 2000. Also, the engine was not optimised enough, and sometimes, you couldnt talk to mission critical characters. Other than these little gripes, great game!

The Bottom Line
Buy and play this game. It's only $20. Then buy Hitman 2!

Windows · by James1 (240) · 2002

Excellent ideas but badly executed

The Good
The idea of being a hit man, assassin, murderer. Somewhy people tend to like being the bad guy. Here you are about as bad as you can get. You have absolutely no way to justify the acts you do in the game. You just kill for money and that's it. Althought how gruesome and wrong this might feel, it still, quite scarily, is FUN.

Most of the time you are playing this game as a puzzle game. This is emphasized with the lack of saved games. When you are committing a murder, there is no such thing as luck. Every single step, shot, crouch, door-opening, kill, at least should be planned before.

The game content, graphics and sound, are well done. They are not ground-breaking or superior to other games, but they get the job done. Special mention to the very life-like (yeah, right) bodies. And the camera work in in-game cinematics is just breathtaking. These guys should be making movies.

The Bad
The game's controls are awful. You have separate button for running, and it feels bad. Why didn't they do it in the standard way? Selecting your weapon and action is done like in Operation Flashpoint, with a little menu to select what you want to do. Unfortunately, you'll have to open the menu to see what you can do. And you must select an action before the menu closes and the menu is located in the middle of the screen, making all firing and aiming impossible. To make things even worse, I could not assign the mouse wheel to handle the menu, so it is even harder to get the right choice.

Also the lack of saving games in the middle of a mission is a bad mistake in a game like this. Althought it adds into the atmosphere of the game, it also makes it very hard even on the easiest difficulty setting.

While the camera works great in the cinematic sequences, your own head obscures the view in the game sometimes, further fustrating you.

The Bottom Line
This game starts off very promising and contains a lot of good ideas and excellent camera work, but is very flawed due to the bad controls and the lack of saving.

It is very hard to recommend this game, but I am sure that many people will love it. Just try before you buy.

Windows · by Aapo Koivuniemi (41) · 2002

[ View all 10 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Guards' room in "Traditions of the Trade"? Daniel Saner (3503) Feb 15, 2013
Music in Windows Vista Daniel Saner (3503) Oct 2, 2008

Trivia

BPjS/BPjM index

On April 28, 2001, Hitman: Codename 47 was put on the infamous German index by the BPjS. For more information about what this means and to see a list of games sharing the same fate, take a look here: BPjS/BPjM indexed games.

Trivia originally contributed by Xoleras on 18.12.2005.

References

  • Pablo's line "Say hello to my little friend" is an obvious reference to the movie Scarface.
  • The entire setup of the third mission, "The Massacre at Cheung Chau Fish Restaurant", is extremely similar to a scene of The Godfather, with both the setup (negotiation in a restaurant with gangsters and police), as well as the execution (hiding a gun in the bathroom).

Trivia originally contributed by EboMike on 18.12.2003 and 08.06.2004.

Naked strippers

An earlier beta of the game featured the strippers found in the game with no clothes.

Trivia originally contributed by Zovni on 13.02.2001.

Real-world locations

In an interview with fansite HitmanHQ, lead animator Jens Peter Kurup of Io Interactive stated: "The different locations were either constructed with picture reference or by actually visiting the different places to get the atmosphere right. [...] The Hotel in Budapest actually exists [...], and some of the guys checked it out in details. Then it's modified to fit the gameplay."

The game's Thermal Bath Hotel GallĂ rd in Budapest mentioned in the interview, as visited in the mission Traditions of the Trade, is inspired by real-world Danubius Hotel GellĂŠrt, also in Budapest.

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Ray Soderlund.

Additional contributors: Zovni, Daniel Saner, tarmo888, Sciere, Stratege, CaesarZX.

Game added December 15, 2000. Last modified March 14, 2024.