Following the rebranding of the Hitman trilogy into the World of Assassination, developer IO Interactive is putting the franchise “a little bit on hiatus” with Project 007 in the works.
The story of IO Interactive has been a roller coaster, to be sure, with plenty of failures and successes, purchases by Eidos Interactive and Square Enix, and most recently, regaining its independence with Hitman as its pillar to stand on following the franchise’s 2016 reboot.
Now IO Interactive’s future looks incredibly bright, finally self-publishing the third entry in the Hitman reboot, while reconfiguring the trilogy into the World of Assassination—loaded with all of the content made from the prior three releases.
With all the success Hitman has offered the studio, IO Interactive has other projects in the works, with an “online fantasy RPG” in early development, as well as a stand-alone James Bond title—codenamed Project 007—that was originally announced in November of 2020.
“And it’s not about survival now,” IO Interactive chief creative officer Christian Elverdam said in an interview with Eurogamer, “It’s about spreading our wings with other titles as well. Hitman will always be, as you said, intertwined with IO Interactive, but we’ve done IPs before, and we have an unannounced project (the online fantasy RPG), we have Bond we’re working on, so it’s also absolutely amazing that besides the Hitman franchise that we absolutely love, we can also spread our creative wings and expand a bit on the things that we want to achieve.”
“Right now a major, major new Hitman game: that’s a little bit on hiatus, as we’re building another agent fantasy that’s also taking up a lot of our time,” Elverdam said referencing the already-announced James Bond project. “But obviously we’ll come back to beloved Agent 47. He’s still very much in the heart of this company.”
