How IO Interactive beat the odds to regain its agency
Visiting IO Interactive’s Copenhagen headquarters, Agent 47 is a constant presence. At reception we’re greeted by a life-size model, helium balloons bobbing against its glass case, celebrating the same anniversary that has brought Edge here. Across the room, looping clips from Animal Crossing: New Horizons follow a villager whose bald head, suit and red tie make us fear for the life of Tom Nook. Even in the bathroom you can’t escape him, those cold blue eyes peering out of picture frames on every wall.
It can feel, at times, like walking around a shrine. Not that we’d blame anyone. Since the release of its debut game in 2000, IO has been synonymous with Hitman. And without Agent 47, the studio might well never have seen its 25th birthday – nor, indeed, its 20th. This is the story that CEO and co-owner Hakan Abrak is telling when he pauses for a moment, to pick up yet another effigy from the conference table – a big-headed chibi rendering of the studio’s mascot – and attempt to rub a smudge from its shiny plastic pate.
Abrak is telling us about 2006, the year he joined IO, just a few months after the release of Hitman: Blood Money. “A transformative time,” is how he remembers it. “IO was fully embracing being multi-project, making multiple games at the same time – and growing very, very fast.” While it was working on a Hitman game the entire time, Agent 47 disappeared from public view for six years, and IO gave other things a go, including the Kane & Lynch games on which Abrak got his start.
Not that he has any rosetinted glasses there. “We’ve done other IPs but, let’s be honest, they haven’t stuck around like Hitman.”
Looking back on those days now, something dawns on Abrak. “I had thought about this before, but now it’s crystal clear,” he says. “We’ve kind of come back to the same place.” IO is once again preparing to put Agent 47 on the shelf, instead focusing its energies on two new games, Project 007 and Project Fantasy, being made across five countries. “We have a dream that we can be not only ‘the Hitman studio’.”
But getting back to that same place, where it can once again attempt to realise that dream, has been a long and painful journey for the studio. Within the space of a decade, it gained and lost an owner, had to shrink and grow back on three separate occasions, and found itself just weeks from bankruptcy. How it survived all that is a truly unlikely story – and one that, for Abrak at least, begins with the disastrous development of 2012’s Hitman: Absolution.
Absolution arrived right at the tail end of IO’s prior attempt to vary the kind of games it makes. With Mini Ninjas, it had attempted a family-friendly approach; with Kane & Lynch, it had gone in quite the opposite direction. Neither set the world on
