Hitman / Tropes A to C

Tropes A to C - Tropes D to L - Tropes M to Z -

This page covers tropes found throughout the Hitman series.

Subjective tropes go to the YMMV page.

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A

• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: A common sight in Silent Assassin and Contracts. At least your enemies can't follow you down there. Usually.
• Acceptable Breaks from Reality:
  • Kind of like how James Bond still manages to be a "secret" agent while being treated like an international rock star, somehow, the Slenderman impersonator with the barcode tattoo doesn't get detained on sight, despite him being in the vicinity of high-profile murders. As the games go on, though, it becomes less and less plausible, particularly since (before the PS4 release, that is) 47 never changed his standard appearance until he was neck-deep in the mission.
  • A notable thing about NPCs is that they aren't very observant. Most KO's don't count as a witness even if they were alone with you seconds before you jammed the syringe into them. They rarely if ever glance upwards, and if a locked door is suddenly wide open, no one cares. (A well-known exploit is to shoot/wire guards through half-open doors.) If gasoline is pooling around their feet, no one smells it.
  • The improved lighting engine doesn't help matters. The menacing outline of 47 is clearly seen, but enemies will not turn around to check where this shadow is coming from—even in restricted areas! In Absolution, guards won't be able to spot you behind an air vent (even at eye-level), despite the telltale flicker of 47's lighter.
  • As long as you're wearing the right disguise, guards generally don't mind if you try to navigate the levels in more-than-suspicious ways (climbing the pipes and walking on roofs). In one level of SA, you can silently attach the bomb to a car while disguising as a limousine driver... and go straight down the sewer hatch, which guards apparently consider a perfectly normal thing to do.
  • Absolution: Wait until the "BBQ Pro" Mason McCready sends one of his men to fetch his hot sauce, which you were clever enough to exchange for some spicy butane. What's interesting is you do not hide, or even do anything during this scene. His friends will just gawk as Mason goes up in flames and will not attempt to help him. What is this, The Sims?
  • As each game is designed with replayability in mind, this means that as the player learns more and more of each level, 47 effectively becomes a full-blown psychic, capable of knowing the exact routes of guards he has never seen, which food/drink belongs to each person, his target's personal routine and where each single security camera and room is on a place he's never been in - not to mention the fact that the player can take gear obtained after any given level back into them. Of course, there's really no way to avoid this other than limiting what the player can do.
• Ace Custom:
  • The W2000 rifle from SA is a bit different from the one used in C47 in that it's a bolt-action, i.e. you have to reload after each shot. The Custom Rifle is more up your alley. It's wielded by the enemy snipers, so it's possible to grab one early — if you don't care about ratings.
  • Two characters in Blood Money carry their own custom 1911 pistols loaded with Magnum ammo. It's also one of the few weapons that's unavailable after completing a mission with it.
  • Each of the 'boss' characters in Absolution carry unique equipment which can be added to your collection. For instance, the leader of the Saints, LaSandra, carries an Aries Charging Ram with an engraving of barbed wire running up the barrel. The Agency outfits all of its people with ICA-branded guns and knives.
  • 47's own Silverballers from the second game onwards are customised for his own needs. Blood Money expands on this, allowing the player to customise them to their own specifications along with one weapon in every other category.
• Action-Based Mission: Several missions in the first two games, which were probably the least well-received parts of both. Absolution is the most contentious of them all, though, with its revamp to Splinter Cell Conviction style gameplay.
• Air-Vent Passageway:
  • All over the place in Absolution. 47 will automatically take out his lighter and hold it in front of the camera.
  • In SA, you can use the hospital vents to scope out which O.R. the cult leader is staying in, but the game engine apparently wasn't ready for this yet, so the "vent" is accessible by ladder. You don't even have to crouch.
• Ain't Too Proud to Beg:
  • In "Invitation to a Party", Spetnaz sends someone to thwart the defection of a General and kill his accomplice, the Ambassador, if he gets in the way. Germany can't delegate its way out of this one. "I give you money. Let me go, ja?" The player can choose to save the Ambassador though.
  • The Swing King will beg 47 for his life, even promising to pay "triple" the amount of money 47 was paid for this contract. A dubious claim, judging by the state of his amusement park.
  • If you pull a weapon in front of Lorne de Haviland, he'll scurry away while pleading, "What do you want, girls? Cars? Junk? REAL ESTATE? I've got it all! I'm the guy who knows the guys who know!"
  • The last target in "Requiem", Rick Henderson, is a sad-sack journalist with no means of protection. When you confront him, he'll kneel to the ground and beg for mercy. "You're secret's safe with me. I swear to God, I won't tell a soul!" However, you can clearly see a tape recorder in his hand.
  • The crown goes to Lenny Dexter in "End of the Road". Not only does he spend the entire time begging, but he'll passive-aggressively insult you depending on which weapon you're carrying, then offer to give 47 "a real good reach-around" if you spare him.
• A.K.A.-47:
  • Codename 47 and the demo of Silent Assassin used real names for firearms, except for one older gun that was simply called the "Derringer", but the full release of the latter changed all the names to generic or false ones, and every game since then has continued the trend. Apparently IO just didn't want to pay for licensed gun names.
  • The AMT Hardballer is an interesting use of this. Like the other guns, in the original game it was referred to by its real name, and it also looked rather generically like a 1911 (being a clone of that gun and all). In Silent Assassin onward, where it was renamed to the "Baller" and then the "Silverballer", the in-game model also got an extensive redesign with custom grips and the series' stylized fleur-de-lis logo, indicating that they are meant to be a custom design and "Silverballers" are his name for his personal handguns.
  • The "World Of Assassination" trilogy generally enforces this trope, likely to avoid legal troubles and to avoid paying to use the gun names. The Walther 2000 from past games is renamed to the Sieger 300, the M1911 seen in the tutorial is known in-universe as the ICA19 (mockingly known as the Blackballer among the fandom as it's also your starting weapon), while the Shashka A33 is quite obviously an AK.47 in all but name. 47's personal Silverballer avoids this problem, as it's better known by that name (ditto for the Goldballer).
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy:
  • Silent Assassin: It's just possible that Gen. Zhupikov might have a drinking problem.◊ He also has a bad habit of intercepting drinks meant for the other guests, which proves fatal when the waiter turns out to be 47. He's such an obliging fellow, he even finds an out-of-the-way spot to die.
  • Contracts: Alistair and a hunting buddy are getting hammered in a 1st floor study. They don't even turn to look at the butler to see if it's him. If 47 steals the glass that the butler (constantly) refills, he can poison Alistair's drink, which kills him quietly, without his intoxicated friend noticing.
  • Blood Money: Pine Cone is not an actual rehabilitation center. It's a safehouse for mobsters laying low. There's even statements that people who go into the clinic come out as alcoholics due to their being nothing to do in the place but lie back and indulge. 47 carries around 4 cocktails in his pocket that can be used to spike the other drinks.
    • The Santa at Lorne's party is completely shitfaced. Ditto "Corky the Clown". The least difficult by far is "Slugger's" sexy wife, who starts the mission drunk and waves off guards who are placed there for her protection.
• All Crimes Are Equal: The games tend to give most guards only two alert levels - "perfectly fine" and "immediate application of deadly force". The intermediate "warning" is a rarity found only on very few missions.
  • Here's a great headline from The Long Island Sun (Blood Money): "Kids Lemonade Stand Condemned and Demolished".
  • If a guard sees you gun down a civilian in cold blood, he'll shoot you in the face. If a guard sees you running in public wearing nothing except a pair of swimming trunks, he'll shoot you in the face. If a guard sees you walk into the EMPLOYEES ONLY bathroom, he'll sternly warn you. Then shoot you in the face.
  • The Hotel Galar is littered with metal detectors and cops will shoot first and forget about questions altogether. (They won't even bother to collect your change and make you walk through it again if you set it off. They'll just open fire on you.) In later games, they will calmly frisk you and confiscate any weapons.
  • Taken to extremes in the New Orleans level of Blood Money, where a bouncer for a perfectly normal bar will shoot you in the face without warning for walking into a Blues-themed party with a panama hat.
  • Absolution downplays this, entering a low-level restricted area without a disguise will first result in a warning, followed by an attempted arrest if the player lingers, then deadly force if the situation escalates further. High-level security areas start at "attempting arrest" and escalates to deadly force normally. The "shoot on sight" rules will only apply during missions where certain types of enemies are actively hunting 47.
  • Averted in 2016. To truly earn the guards' ire, the player needs to do something that is blatantly suspicious and/or illegal. The player entering restricted areas or fiddling with stuff they are not supposed to will at first just prompt guards to either ask 47 if he is lost and then politely but firmly ask him to leave the area, and it takes them quite a while to actually escalate to using force.
• All Part of the Show:
  • In Tosca, Cavaradossi attempts to fake his death and flee the country with Tosca, which fails when the executioner's fake gun is exchanged for a real one. As Cavaradossi dies, Tosca exclaims "What an actor!" before hurrying to Cavaradossi's body and discovering in shock that he is really dead. The incredible irony is that if the player chooses to replace the fake gun with the real one, the events unfold like a story within a story, with Alvaro as Cavaradossi and his gay lover as Tosca. Just to show you how much attention to detail is given: when you switch the prop gun for the real thing, the actor playing the executioner will say (in French) something to the effect of "Wow, this thing feels so real".
  • In "A Dance With The Devil", you can dunk NPCs into the shark tank backstage, then watch as a shark swims by and gobbles them up, dragging the victim to their death. Then go outside to the dance floor to watch the shark play with its prey while everybody keeps dancing. One of the targets, Vaana, can be to plunge herself into the tank if the pyrotechnics show is sabotaged. After rigging the stage and cooking Vaana, you can hear a guest saying something along the lines of, "That show was amazing—especially the shark attack at the end! How do you figure she did that?"
  • "Fight Night": This method requires you to shoot Sanchez with a sniper rifle from above the arena, which is more difficult than it sounds, and can create extra casualties if the bullets hits an audience member. Also, in order to pass the "Wingman" challenge, the guards cannot become alerted and you cannot be spotted while firing, so the shot needs to land right after the Patriot hits Sanchez to make it look like the Patriot knocked Sanchez out. If you do it right, the gunshot will be loud but it seem like nobody but apart from the guards picked up on it.
  • Hitman (2016): In the training missions, targets, guards and civilians are played by ICA employees. 47 can throw them off buildings, drown them in toilets or throw knives at them which remain stuck in their heads. Good thing Diana told him beforehand that all weapons are just “simulated”. Even if the player avoids doing all that, the Jasper Knight missions offers an opportunity to trick "Knight" into activating a fighter jet ejector seat that blasts him through a hangar roof and off into the sky. The actors even break character for a minute and call 47 a "crazy bastard". 47 and Diana just straight up murdered a fellow employee for real and ICA hires them anyway! (Though Hitman 2 retconned the ending by revealing that a parachute activated once "Jasper" hit the ceiling.)
• The All-Seeing A.I.:
  • The older Hitman games are quite notorious for their rather broken A.I. Though the problems have been ironed out with each new instalment, for the most part, guards will still turn psychic every now and again:
  • Hitman 2: Silent Assassin, which, being a Stealth-Based Game, ought to be generally good in this respect, is the worst of the lot. The game has what can only be described as highly jittery bunch of guards, often resorting to gunfire at the slightest infraction or social gaffe. Take the snow pass level: the developers apparently forgot that a blizzard, at night ought to have some effect on the ninjas' ability to spot you; they're also preset to realize that your outfit is stolen and open fire after a five-second wait animation - even if you walk away and are well out of sight by the time they're done checking your "ID". It gets worse with the snipers in watchtowers. Even if you are wearing a ninja uniform that completely covers your face, they will instantly recognize you as an impostor from hundreds of feet away and shoot you on sight.
  • In Blood Money:
    • if any level which 47 must avoid or eliminate rival assassins before they can get him, the rivals can always see through his disguise instantly, whatever it might be. Vaana, the hostess in the Hell Party, will be completely fooled if you're wearing her boyfriend's costume, but Maynard John, the bartender at the same party, will automatically recognize 47 through the masquerade mask despite him having no physically defining features from the front. Case in point: "Amendment XXV". Sneak a gun in a briefcase yourself? The guards shoot you full of holes. Sneak the gun in in someone else's case? Said civilian is escorted for questioning and said case is conveniently left for your retrieval.
    • The suspicion meter just isn't that intuitive, and while it does allow for trespassing more easily, the mechanics of the meter are not understood by a lot of players, and it makes the AI seem unfairly able to hone in on you.
  • For Absolution, the Instinct meter and disguise system are interlinked with each other (suddenly every street vendor in the area knows who you are, and do anything illegal and the feds look for you) leaves the stealth mechanic feeling very forced; like something which was put in there at the last minute.
  • The World of Assassination trilogy went out of its way to try and get rid of this trope from the games. Generally, guards much less jittery when it comes to trespassing, and unless an area is marked as hostile (which is incredibly rare by itself), they will escort you out of a restricted area so long as you follow along. Similarly, enforcers are more selective (a white dot denotes they can see through your disguise), so now getting around a level is far less irritating than in past games, and more consistently balanced as only certain people (usually target bodyguards) see through your disguise. Even Instinct, derided in Absolution for being essential yet annoying to work with, was rebalanced to work infinitely, and is now an informative tool, rather than letting you point shoot and get past guards.
• Amoral Attorney: The shotgun-toting lawyer in "Anathema", the literally devil-horned Andrei Puscus, Ken "The Brick" Morgan, the cutthroat Tokyo trial lawyer Yuki Yamazaki, and the new appointed head of Providence Don Yates.
• Anachronic Order:
  • As you progress through C47, you may find letters lying about the Targets' rooms. It seems the four men all served in the military together and kept in close contact. In Lee Hong's letter, he spelled out the importance of the Jade Figurine in winning the loyalty of the Hong Kong Triads, which explains how your mystery "client" knew to steal it. Also, Pablo has a letter from some character named "Ort-Meyer" telling him to expect a visit from 47 soon. The missions are broken up by short flashbacks of five guys chatting over a body. Eventually the player will work out that these shadows belong to the men 47 has assassinated.
  • Contracts and Blood Money are all over the shop. In chronological order, the individual missions would go:
    1. the second and third missions of Blood Money,
    2. the entirety of Contracts (which itself consists primarily of flashbacks to earlier missions, which are themselves not in chronological order),
    3. the first mission of Blood Money,
    4. and then the fourth mission of Blood Money onwards.
  • Hitman 2016 is the start a soft reboot/ sequel/ prequel all in one. It's a sequel taking place after Absolution that also contains a prequel tutorial chapter showing 47's induction into the ICA, and is a soft reboot in the sense of its story containing canonical kills from the past games (Killing Don in Absolution with a silverballer is impossible to do as you don't have it for that mission, for example), and acknowledging past events do happen.
• Aristocrats Are Evil:
  • Diana is a zigzagged example of this trope. In the promotional materials for Absolution, we learn that she's the daughter of a baronet and has studied overseas. She probably could run a Fortune 500 company or buy a political office if she wanted, but she chose to work for the ICA (Not that it hasn't paid off handsomely for her.) Travis described her as a "first-class mind in an upper-class skull." However, the comics later reveal that she came to work at the ICA as a sort of safety net, after her attempt to kill all of those responsible for the death of her family failed; Her teaming up with the ICA made any potential threats scarper away.
  • The Beldingfords tick every Blue Blood stereotype, including poisoning their brandy and hunting human beings for sport.
• Arms Dealer: No shortage of these in Hitman. Rutgert Van Leuven (Hell's Angel), Boris and his brother Sergei (Russian mobsters), Masahiro Hayamoto Sr. (Oyabun), Cmdr. Bjarkhov (former Red Army officer), Carmine DeSalvo (Italian-American mobster), Agent Martinez (CIA) and his mistress Vaana , Blake Dexter (business mogul), Vito Đurić (elusive target in Hitman (2016)), and Robert Knox (pioneer in robotic warfare).
• Artificial Brilliance: Despite all the interesting ways to abuse the AI, the series still has rather sophisticated disguise system, particularly seen in Silent Assassin and Contracts - various characters react differently to your disguise, depending on your clothes and behavior. Part of the difficulty in older games is not only finding a way to silently kill a target, but also navigate the level without giving guards enough opportunities to see through your disguise - if you loiter around for too long or start running without a reason, they'll get suspicious of you, and a couple of seconds is enough for them to decide that the weird bald dude with barcode on his head isn't a guard.
• Artificial Stupidity: Stupidity is endemic throughout the Hitman saga, and you can read all about it in the respective trope pages for each game. Each subsequent game improves on it, but it is still very much possible to break the AI.
  • Starting with Contracts, it's possible to kill some people "by accident". When civilians see the target go down, they will run in panic and 47 can watch them try to alert the guards who stand with a Flat "What". Eventually, one will approach 47, try a search for weapons, and upon finding nothing of interest, return to his guard post. Then again, the whole idea of accidents is lack of any connection with the Hitman, so there is no reason why the guards should harass a bald guy in a suit only because someone got nailed by a falling piano.
  • The AI is generally pretty good, but it has quirks that can easily be exploited. For example, the standard procedure for handling stray explosives seems to be "gingerly pick it up and carry to the nearest guard booth". And in the absence of said booth, a guard may just slip a live explosive into his pocket.
• Artistic License – Geography:
  • Nuristan, for those not in the know, is a region of Afghanistan which, unfortunately, looks nothing like its depiction in Silent Assassin. It's more mountainous, surprisingly green, and the culture has a heavy Chinese influence. IO picked it because it's a place in Afghanistan.
  • It's pretty obvious that the setting of Hope, South Dakota in Absolution was originally intended to be located in Texas, based on the climate, wildlife, fashion sense of the inhabitants, and prominence of the HS football teams, among many other things. Only the cinematic at Mt. Rushmore is uniquely South Dakotan and it could easily be a late addition. It looks like the setting was changed to South Dakota very late in the game's development, presumably because there are 27 million potential customers to offend in Texas and less than a million in South Dakota, and moving the game setting to an even less populous state would have made the the disparities even more noticeable.
  • The "A Vintage Year" mission in Blood Money is set in Chile, in a winery/drug-lab described to be outside Santiago. The place happens to be in the middle of a rainforest with an enormous waterfall behind it. There are no rainforests to be found in Chile, specially around Santiago, which is a semi-arid and subtropical region. The Valdivian Temperate Rainforests and Magellanic Subpolar Rainforests are mostly in Chile, though far south from the wine-producing regions. There are still some forests near Santiago, though given the low amount of rainfall (360 mm on a good year), they're not at all dense.
• Artistic License – History:
  • No self respecting Hong Kong Triad member would be wearing Manchu robes and queues in the modern era, as the Triads originate from attempts to overthrow the Manchu Qing Dynasty. This is lampshaded by Lee Hong's dossier, which states that he wears them to overcompensate for the fact that he'd been away so long he felt like an outsider.
• An Ass-Kicking Christmas:
  • In Blood Money, 47 spends Christmas with a famous pornographer and the woman-beating failson of a U.S. Senator.
  • "Holiday Hoarders", a bonus level featuring a Christmas makeover for the Paris mission. Santa Claus randomly appears around the building, inviting you to whack him and steal his suit.
• "Ass" in Ambassador:
  • In SA, the German Ambassador is a good acquaintance of Gen. Zupikhov and has agreed to squirrel him out of Russia. Also, he apparently has an appetite for sweets as can be seen by the sheer amount of chocolates stashed in his embassy safes. (He's not all bad, though; if you save him from the Spetnaz, he'll let you walk off with the suitcase scot free.)
  • In Contracts and Blood Money, one of the recurring characters is Richard Delahunt, a "one-time Presidential Candidate" and current Ambassador to the Vatican. Dick became an embarrassment after he was implicated in a child sex ring (actually, he's the ringleader), and he was flushed from the system shortly thereafter. He continues to make trouble in Paris, which is why 47 was asked to rub him out.
• Asshole Victim:
  • Nobody does psychotics like IO does.
  • Almost all of 47's victims tend to be either criminals or just plain corrupt individuals. There are exceptions, such as a private investigator that has failed his job and was captured, a journalist who got too close (and was also captured), another journalist and a priest.
  • In the World of Assassination trilogy, this becomes a very pronounced pattern, where not only are all the victims corrupt or criminals, but they also almost inevitably turn out to abusive, unpleasant jerks on top of that. Almost all of them are various flavors of Bad Boss (sometimes murderously so). Many are abusive in various ways to those close to them. Plenty (especially those involved with Providence) are also classicists. There are only a handful of targets that are either at least sympathetic or kind (usually one or the other, rarely both.) These targets nonetheless still have crossed the Moral Event Horizon at some point to get a contract put on them in the first place.
• Author Appeal: The IO development team are fanatics of the F.C. Copenhagen (FCK) soccer team. They always find excuses to fit those initials in somewhere.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Dual-wielding guns. Alas, it takes ages for 47 to prepare them, they make your targeting reticule go crazy—and in Silent Assassin, they're so powerful, the target tends to go flying into the path of bystanders, so you'll probably never use them if you're concerned about stealth! These things just stick out like a sore thumb, so only use them if you've been found out. The double shot means almost an assured kill.
  • SMGs and rifles are noisy and therefore useless unless part of a disguise. The silenced SMG would be very lethal...if you could conceal it. Unfortunately, it is made less useful by the size of the sound suppressor, which makes it act as a rifle (i.e. it can't be hidden and you can only carry one). Also, the enemies usually have the same weapon, making them a considerable threat. Only use if in serious trouble. In a confined space, Kalashnikov is your best friend.
  • As a corollary to that, Blood Money's custom guns outside of the Silverballer (which is concealable) and the WA2000 (which can be packed in a suitcase) are of limited use, especially seeing as how 47 doesn't carry them on his person into a level, instead having to retrieve them from a stash. Upgrades cost money and ammunition from other similar weapons is incompatible with them, meaning you can't resupply from dead enemies. Oh, and leaving them behind incurs a recovery penalty in the form of 47 having to pay someone to bring them back.
  • Southeast of Pablo's narco mansion is an angled tent where you will also find your first Minigun. There's a lot of ammo laying around for it and the gun itself just screams, "take me with you!" Leave it alone, because it really isn't worth the trouble. The Minigun is not standard issue and slows 47 to a crawl, and so if you want to take it into the house for the fight against Pablo, you'll need to take out everyone outside first. And then, ho hum, taking those guys out will alert the tower guards, and then you'll have to take them out, too (yawn), and then you'll also probably have to take out some of the patrols along the fence... It can be done if you're good enough, but it's not recommended unless you're out for some pain. The other big drawback is that it takes nearly 2 seconds to actually shoot the weapon. Basically, the barrel needs to be spinning before it starts spitting. So, by the time you start to fire, your target either has moved out of the way or...uh, killed you. Not good.
    • The minigun shows up again in "Meet Your Brother". In Contracts, if you have "Ortmeyer's Key" (uncovered in a later mission) you can replay the asylum level and use it to open the two locked doors in the lab. One yields this weapon. The catch is, there's no way to walk out with it without a bloodbath, and even then, it'll take forever and a day to carry it upstairs to the exit.
  • The sniper rifle is only mandatory in the first mission of H:C47. There are some great sniper's nests in "Say Hell to My Little Friend" and "Gunrunner's Paradise" if you want to play it high and dry ... except it lacks a silencer, and there are just too many people to kill once you start. In Contracts, the W2000 is strapped to a silencer by default, and each level has been remade to be more sniper-friendly.
  • New to the Contracts collection is a quicker knock-out toy, the sedative syringe. The poison syringe is introduced in Blood Money. This thing can be used up close, but there's no real reason to do so; the wire is faster and it's not like poison is somehow cleaner. Both syringes can be used to poison food and drink, but you can forget about getting away with it under observation. There's a lot of incidental food and drink around in Blood Money, but not all of it is useful to poison.
• Ax-Crazy:
  • Some of the Asylum inmates are surprisingly sociable. Others, not so much. In one of the surgery rooms, a patient is hacking away at the body of a Mr. 48. And a little further into the mission, the Politia are funneling the inmates into a room near the front door to try and catch 47. One of those inmates has a gun, and will open fire on everyone in the room once it gets too full for his liking.
  • Malcolm Sturrock, brother of Campbell, isn't mentioned in the briefing, but if you're not careful, he'll pounce on you outta nowhere like Scissorman and cleave you to bits. He turns out to be a childlike stalker who murdered an underage girl and put her pickled body on display in a meat locker. When you find him, he is dancing around in his underwear in front of the object of his affection.
  • If you dress up as a psychologist in Blood Money, you can get Carmine on the couch.
    "I've always been a real angry person, you know? Anger, that's like a drug, you know? [stammering] I mean, it gets in your blood and it boils in your head. It gets—you can't see straight. You can't talk to anyone without wanting to twist their fuckin' head off. Like a bottle cap, you know?"
  • Should you wind up alone in a room with Eve (Blood Money) it will trigger a cutscene in which she leaps on top of you and stabs you to death while cackling to herself. Instant Game Over. As there's no way to stop this once the scene triggers, it also manages to turn into Paranoia Fuel, as you try to deal with her WITHOUT the scene going off...
  • There are a number of characters in Absolution who fit the bill. Blake Dexter, Wade, The Saints, and Ben Travis. To these psychotics, the words "collateral damage" may as well be in Aramaic.

B

• Back Stab: In each game, 47 has special attacks (garrote, syringe or chloroform, along with some special attacks) that automatically kill or disable an unaware target. These attacks are almost always much easier to perform from behind (the garrote specifically only works from behind).
• Bad Boss:
  • Pablo is shown kicking the tar out of an underling in the surveillance footage.
  • In his letter, Ort-Meyer complains of a lack of funding and says he may need to "move the entire lab soon", as some of his staff members are getting jittery about the project. Dr. Kovacs is probably the rat in question; some months later, Ort-meyer deploys you to eliminate him.
  • In Contracts, one of the sailors tries to talk down Boris after he readies the nuke. Bad idea.
  • Scoop is also very unforgiving: he can be seen executing one of his soldiers to prove a point.
  • The strip club owner, Dom Osmond, berates his dancers every chance he gets. And that's if you're lucky. The seditious workers are chained up in the cellar and tortured as Dom cobbles a snuff movie out of it. Osmond is tight with two of the game's main adversaries, Blake Dexter and Edward Wade, and he is overheard arranging a private session for the latter when he's in town. Wade is a sadomasochistic, sociopathic necrophiliac, in that order.
  • During an interrogation, Dexter tries to bludgeon 47 with a baton—but on closer examination, it's actually a sex toy which Skurky left lying around. ("Hell, that ain't mine.") He later executes Skurky's girlfriend, "Mrs. Cooper", in front of witnesses after forcing her to dress up as Victoria. He also murders a hotel maid in order to stall Mr. 47.
• Bad Ending:
  • Codename 47: When the Mr. 48s are all dead, ready your gun and prepare to meet your maker. The Doc will come out with open arms thinking you're a 48; however, he runs towards you after he's done talking (he's brandishing a tazer). At that point, 47 either fills him with lead, or gets sedated and winds up back where he began: a prisoner.
  • In Blood Money, an alternate ending occurs if the player does not refill 47's health bar with the movement controls. The antidote to the fake-death serum apparently fails to work and 47 is cremated, allowing Cayne to roll off on his merry way and reboot Dr. Ort-Meyer's research. This is highly likely for those playing it for the first time.
  • Hitman III has one that doubles as a Call-Back to the Codename 47 example above if 47 decides to take the memory wiping serum.
• Bad Guy Bar: Lee Hong's place (Wang Fou), the Meat King's party, the Flamin' Rotterdam, the Shark Club, and the Vixen Club. Each of these fine establishments contain torture rooms. That's not a coincidence.
• Bad Guys Play Pool:
  • The pool cue makes its debut in Contracts. You'll find some in Beldingford Manor and on the bar strip in Rotterdam. The Vixen Bar also features some hoods playing pool.
  • A funny example in the Great Balls of Fire Tavern: One player deliberates on his shot while his opponent uses reverse-psychology, clears his throat loudly, and distracts him ("some guy is taking your girlfriend to the bathroom!")
    "I swear to God, if you don't shut up I'm gonna ram this stick up your ass and call it modern art."
• Bad Habits:
  • Blood Money: The "priest" officiating the hick wedding is completely shitfaced. He mixes up the the couples' name and makes a pass at the bride. When he ducks into a closet to "read the good book" (it's a secret container for his flask), knock him out and steal his clothes. Naturally, there's a bonus cutscene where you can tie the knot for your target.
  • In "A Dance With The Devil", Maynard's choice of costume is a Satanic minister with red makeup, an inverted cross, and horns. Eve is dressed as a killer Victoria's Secret model: cheap-looking wings, a halo, and body tape.
  • The sequel Absolution had a trailer featuring a hitsquad of female assassins called The Saints who wear nun habits as disguise. They take these off when going into combat wearing latex fetish outfits with insanely high-heeled platform boots underneath, keeping their veils on. As if to make fun of this, not even The Agency knows why they dress like that. (Trailers try to play up how badass and dangerous the women are by showing them fighting in a jungle in those outfits.)
  • 47 himself goes undercover as one in "Rosewood", complete with a Jesus fish on his lapel.
• Ballroom Blitz:
  • "Invitation to a Party". There is going to be an invitation-only gala at the German embassy, and lots of spies will be attending. However, the Agency couldn't get an invitation for you, so you will have to be creative in order to get inside. And worse, the Russians have managed to smuggle in a Spetznaz agent who will be competing with Mr. 47 for the General's briefcase. To make the Spetnaz come out of hiding, you need to get inside the ballroom.
  • "Meat King's Party." The targets are found at a party held in celebration of Campbell's charges being dropped... A party which 47 intends to crash.
  • In Blood Money, 47 invites himself to Lorne's yearly Christmas bash in the Rocky Mountains.
  • The location of Raymond's sniper nest is meant to be random, but he always spawns above the Blue Oyster (blues bar), the Rocker's Choice (rock n' roll), or Latin Fever (salsa).
  • Later, 47 must hunt down a rogue CIA agent involved in weapons trafficking. The buy will be going down at the Shark Club, an underground sex dungeon disguised as an office building.
  • In the Paris level of Hitman 2016, 47 pays a call to Viktor Novikov, and can crush him beneath the lighting display of his own catwalk.
• The Bartender:
  • A whopping four of them feature in Contacts:
    1. The bartender at Campbell Sturrocks' bar/opium den will give you different hints, depending on whether you're dressed as a butcher or a waiter.
    2. "Rendezvous at Rotterdam": Just speak with the bartender inside the Flamin' Rotterdam. If you're dressed as a journalist, he'll provide you with express passage to the gang leader, Rutgert. Later, 47 can glean some useful info by talking to the barkeep in The Dirty Rabbit.
    3. "Traditions of the Trade": If you don't want to wait around the sauna for Fritz, you can prepare him a cyanide cocktail. But doing so requires 47 to convince the hotel bartender to take a pissbreak. The good dentist will drink his fill and keel over.
    4. "Lee Hong Assassination": This guy appeared in the original H:C47; he was the one who referred 47 to the restaurant's "new girl", Mei Ling. In the remake, the bartender is literally ready to shit his pants at the mere mention of Lee Hong. Apparently, another intruder (Agent Smith, no surprise there) was nabbed by the guards after asking too many questions about the...proprietor.
  • There's another one in the Rockies, glumly handing out aphrodisiacs while wearing a Santa hat. He complains of the drunk Santa Claus hired for this party, and looks like he'd rather spend the New Year someplace else.
  • Maynard poses as a bartender at the Shark Club, just waiting to introduce himself to a bleary-eyed Mr. 47. Unsurprisingly (given that he probably has no drink mixing experience), his drinks are terrible and cause one guest to flee the party for the parking garage and vomit.
  • In "Great Balls of Fire", your objective is to cross the bar in question and speak with the bartender, without upsetting the locals in-between. If you want to start a conversation, then your first task is to sic the truckers on Kane (star of Kane & Lynch™, Buy Your Copy Today) to clear the room.
• Batter Up!: The baseball bat melee weapon appears in both Blood Money and Absolution, if you swing that way. In particular, Joseph "Swing King" Clarence was a big fan of baseball and has memorabilia all over his office, including signed posters and a mounted bat used for a perfect home run in the 1970s.
• Battle in the Rain:
  • "Redemption at Gontranno". Sergei's got your boy, Vittorio, at the sanctuary and threatens to kill him if 47 doesn't show himself. Your goal is to work your way to the tool shed (which Sergei hasn't found yet) and grab the gun you need to slaughter all 21 of his henchmen. When you start the mission, you will be in a darkened, rainy courtyard in front of the church doors.
  • At the end of "Amendment XXV", 47 engages Parchezzi in a rainy gun battle on the White House roof.
• Bedlam House:
  • The Asylum from Codename 47 is even more nightmarish in flashbacks. The so-called Operating Theatre has a mutilated corpse lying in full view. Paranoid patients are left untreated, locked in solitary confinement or worse: exploited for Ortmeyer's clone research. The actual asylum is in extreme disrepair and exists mainly as a front.
  • Pine Cone rehab facility. Many celebrities claimed the center has saved their lives, although its infamous quote, "We only discharge the clean and the dead" has led some to wonder what happened to people who can't be cured. 'Troublesome' patients are confined to the medical wing in the basement, surrounded by their masters, the hospital orderlies.
• Beneath Notice:
  • "Slaying a Dragon". If you feel like getting up-close and personal with the Target, there are gardeners weeding the park around his pagoda. The Red Dragons will frisk a gardener for knives and guns, but there are quieter ways of killing people. Cuppa tea?
  • Humble disguises like caterers, janitors, or garbagemen raise less suspicion from the fuzz. (If you're caught on camera in the driveway of Vinnie's house, the FBI just assumes you're collecting the trash.) They are, however, at a disadvantage by restricting the areas you can enter while wearing them.
  • 47 in his stylish peasant attire. If you stick to your turban, you can move about freely in Nuristan and nobody will raise more than an eyebrow. Unfortunately, trying to snipe the motorcade without a solider's uniform practically guarantees you'll be caught.
  • In Absolution, it's also a good idea to turn your back on policemen by interacting with claw game machines.
• BFG:
  • The almighty minigun in Codename 47 and Contracts. At $1,000 a magazine, there's a reason you can't buy this thing in Hong Kong.
  • Leave it to Silent Assassin to take the fun out of the anti-materiel rifle. The MI95 (real name Barrett M95) is so unique to the region that it will ATTRACT passerby. This is bad news if you do not want to be seen with it, since you can't just drop it and wait for the NPCs to leave. Note that the game considers this to be both a Sniper Rifle AND a Heavy Weapon due to its enormous power.
  • The M60 is a very powerful belt fed large machine gun that normally is handled by two people - one to fire and one to handle the ammo belt. However, in Silent Assassin, you handle it just like any machine gun. It's about as accurate as the M4 and is certainly more powerful although it has a slower rate of fire than an assault rifle. The only major drawback to this weapon is that it's pretty loud so you can expect guards to come knocking if you fire it.
• Bikini Bar: The Flamin' Rotterdam, the Dirty Rabbit, the Pink Mansion, the Shark Club, and the Vixen Club.
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • The inscriptions on the ammo boxes in Silent Assassin. If you know your Danish, there's a warning written on the magnum rounds: "If you can read that, you're too close! This ammo will really kick your ass!" The pistol and .45 ACP rounds have funny messages, as well.
  • Hong and Tzun conversing in Chinese. Also, the scene in the brothel is updated for Hitman: Contracts: 47 plays dumb and claims not to understand the madam's elegant Mandarin. The madam keeps her game face on, but proceeds to curse at you and Mei Ling under her breath.
  • Almost every one of Sergei's lines begins with Russian swear words. Some of his phrases, like "Пиздец" or "Хуйня", are considered impolite in Russia and other slavic countries.
  • On some of the Pink Mansion's walls (e.g. in de Havilland's bedroom) are illustrations with different Japanese/Chinese characters: 体　= body; 女 = woman.
  • In Blood Money, some of the newspapers that report on your hits at the end of a stage are foreign. Though all the articles will be in English so you can read them, look around and you'll see bylines for stories like "Eiffel Tower supposedly built by aliens from Jupiter." in French (for instance).
  • In the Blood Money headlines there is a presidential candidate called "Lance O. RegenT". You might wonder why "t" is capitalized. This is mostly for Danish fans to discover, since "LORT"" means "excrement" in that language.
  • "Va el juego a fuera o leyo un libro. Jugar juego de video solamente le hara mas estupido." This quote in the Chilean paper is written in very bad Spanglish. Basically it tells you to read a book or play outside instead of playing, because videogames will only make you stupid.
  • "No tengo ninguna pista que estoy escribiendo" = "I have no clue what I'm writing".
  • "Des grenouilles tueuses détruisent une petit ville". Translation: "Killer frogs destroy small villa".
  • The strip club in Absolution runs under the name "Vixen", which means "to wank" in German, albeit spelled differently. Coincidence or not...
• Black-and-Grey Morality: 47 is a violent, unrepentant killer who has no qualms about killing for money and is not above killing innocent people in order to get the job done (although he does feel some guilt about his actions, as Contracts makes apparent). However, his targets are almost exclusively people even nastier and more vicious than him.
  • He does display some remorse at times though. Particularly when he expressed disgust at Blake Dexter and Benjamin Travis for using "children as weapons" in Absolution. He would also question his morals in the novels, and in one scene in Absolution let Victoria dump the ransom money instead of retrieving the briefcase out of greed.
• Black Comedy: Hitman has a pretty distinct sense of dark humor, which can be extracted not merely from its scripted events, but even more so what it doesn't script out. The open-endedness of the gameplay and freedom to do whatever it takes for 47 to kill his targets allows the player to plan out very creative, convoluted, or schadenfreude-tastic outcomes of their own accord, in turn creating some dissonance where 47 is involved as no matter how ridiculous things get, he'll carry it out with complete conviction (and maybe a dry one-liner or two). It's also fairly easy to let the gruesomeness of what you're doing fall to the wayside as you get the hang of the game's systems, including the series' infamously quirky NPC AI.
• Black-Tie Infiltration:
  • In the first mission of Hitman (2016), The Showstopper, 47 infiltrates a fashion show to kill the designer, Viktor Novikov, but also to kill his associate Dalia Margolis who is auctioning the names of MI6 agents in the most secure part of the palace where the fashion show is held.
  • In the final mission of Hitman 2, The Ark Society, 47 infiltrates a party held for some of the richest individuals in the world belonging to a secret group known as the "Ark Society" to kill its two hosts, the twin sisters Zoe and Sophia Washington.
  • In the final mission of Hitman 3, The Farewell, 47 infiltrates a luxurious retirement party at the countryside manor/vineyard of one of Providence's top executives, Don Yates. Not only must he kill Yates, he also has to kill one Herald sent to watch Burnwood, Tamara Vidal.
• Bland-Name Product:
  • The KinkyCola logo. It uses the same typeface as Coca-Cola.
  • In the much-loved 'A New Life' stage of Blood Money, one of the best ways to get started is to slip a pair of drugged donuts to some FBI agents, so you can steal their uniforms. The fauxnuts are, of course, from 'Delicious Donuts', using the characteristic color scheme and font of Dunkin' Donuts.
  • The reboot series features vending machines that offer Fountain View and Dr. Popp sodas, emulating the trade dress of Mountain Dew and Dr. Pepper, respectively.
  • Judging from the white color of the filter and the pinkish-red ring, it can be inferred that Wade enjoys Camel No. 9 cigarettes.
• Blatant Item Placement:
  • The Hitman series tries to avert this, with most weapons being held in armories and security rooms. However, Agency-issue equipment is often delivered to strange locations, sometimes in plain view of patrolling guards and always stored in "inconspicuous" open black crates. Absolution plays this trope painfully straight, with sniper rifles propped up near vantage points (exactly what is a Carcano rifle doing in the storeroom of a donut shop?) and bricks of C4 just laying around on top of crates etc.
  • Zigzagged in Hitman 2. Any equipment stashed in a location labeled as an Agency Pickup is now provided in a "military briefcase", which 47 can carry openly regardless of disguise. However, 47 is not allowed to pass through frisk checkpoints while carrying it, and if dropped it causes the same sort of reaction among NPCs as a dropped firearm.
• Blending-In Stealth Gameplay: The series is famous for this kind of gameplay, as the title assassin must often navigate large groups of unsuspecting strangers to get to his marks, and has a wide arsenal of disguises and blending-in activities to this end in his repertoire.
• Bling-Bling-BANG!:
  • 47's signature weapons are a pair of custom stainless steel AMT Hardballer pistols with stylized fleurs-de-lis engraved on the slides and Pachmayr American Legend grips. Not too shabby. It was just a plain AMT Hardballer in the original game , but they got a chrome makeover in Silent Assassin. In Silent Assassin and the movies, even his silencers are chrome-plated.
  • The gold Desert Eagle from Contracts. Layla Stockton, meanwhile, has a golden SIG Sauer P226 with etched wooden grips.
  • The ''World Of Assasination" trilogy has several flashy guns, many of them variants of the basic ICA19, such as the Goldballer or El Matador, while some are unique, like the heavily engraved Krugermeier 2-2.
• Bloodless Carnage: In real life, throat-slitting will leave behind quite a mess as your victim bleeds out all over the place. However, this isn't an issue in Hitman 1 & 2 as your immaculate victim just flops to the ground.
• Bloodstained Glass Windows:
  • Hitman is a huge fan of pseudo-Catholic imagery, and 47 fights in plenty of churches.
    1. The first occurs in Sicily, when Sergei and his hit squad take over the Gontranno Sanctuary and hold Father Vitorrio for ransom.
    2. The second happens at the end of Blood Money, at an art deco crematorium somewhere on the east coast, where Cayne plans to destroy 47's remains so nobody can create clones of him. The upside is 47 gets to shoot the attendees at his own funeral.
    3. Rosewood Orphanage has two floors to explore, including a chapel and infirmary full of bullet-riddled nuns.
    4. And again near the end of Absolution, 47 and Sheriff Skurky have a showdown in the Hope Springs Church.
    5. The final mission of Absolution, also called Absolution, takes place at the Burnwood family tomb. It not-so-subtly evokes the finale of Blood Money, with Diana in place of 47.
• Bloody Hilarious:
  • Some of the "accidental" deaths are pretty much straight out of Looney Tunes or are deliberately silly cliches. Among the objects you can drop on targets are an opera chandelier and a piano.
  • In several of the games, the right combination of weapons and disguises is pretty hysterical. Busboy armed with a katana? Pizza delivery man with an M60? An all-too-serious clown with an automatic shotgun? Why the hell not? Or, going in the reverse, you can be an FBI Agent armed with his trusty Red Ryder BB gun^note  You can't shoot your eye out if you are wearing Cool Shades! Everyone else is fair game, though..
• Blown Across the Room:
  • The Silverballers can do this if fired at close range. They were nerfed in Contracts and AGAIN in Blood Money, but if you load 'em with magnum rounds, they will still have this effect.
  • The shotguns in all four five of the Hitman games will do this.
  • In the Absolution mission "Attack of the Saints", 47 gets blown across the room in mid-run when the rocket fired by the Saints hits his hotel room.
• Bodyguard Babes:
  • Lee Hong has some female gangsters patrolling the ground floor of his restaurant. They're wearing suits, sunglasses and packing an uzi like their male counterpart. For the Contracts remake, the female NPCs were all exorcised apart from Mei Ling and her pimp.
  • There are 3 female bodyguards who hang out with Charlie in the hot tub. Charlie is completely helpless, but the ladies are concealing six-shooters, so don't mess with them. There is another woman playing a piano in the living room, and she's packing heat, too.
  • The gag in Absolution is Travis' insistence on surrounding himself with well-armed ladies in fetish gear. Some of the ICA bigwigs are skeptical of The Saints' methods, and at least one of Travis' co-workers complained that the gimp suits completely defeat the purpose of them dressing as nuns.
• Bondage Is Bad:
  • "The Meat King's Party". There's a fetish party being held on the first floor of a slaughterhouse to celebrate Campbell's victory in court. The fiendish lawyer, Andrei, is the guest of honor, so it's tricky to get some alone time with him.. Also, Malcolm (Campbell's brother) uses the rooms on the second floor of the slaughterhouse for his creepy murder rituals.
  • In Blood Money, 47 is sent to dispose of four agents in the Shark Club. There's very little bondage activity going on there, though; mostly it's a swingers club for wealthy Nevada residents.
  • For years, Lorne has taken money under the table by blackmailing public figures (actors, politicians, clergymen, etc.) with CCTV footage from his many strip clubs. He tries to extort money from Colorado senator Chad Bingham with a video of his son killing a prostitute in a BDSM game. Someone in Bingham's camp hired 47 to recover the tape and eliminate both Lorne and Chad Junior.
  • In "Skurky's Law", corrupt Sheriff Clive Skurky chains himself up in his own jail so a dominatrix can whip him during office hours. Blake Dexter even calls him a pervert for it. At other points in the game, various Dexter Inc. mooks are seen watching bondage porn—which is actually footage of the Sheriff himself! Have you no decency sir? At long last?
  • While they never actually engage in BDSM practices in the game, the Saints are always seen wearing latex-and-leather, fetish-y nun outfits.
• Book Ends:
  • Codename 47 begins and ends in the same Romanian asylum, run by Dr. Ort-Meyer.
    • Codename 47's Non-Standard Game Over especially.
  • Silent Assassin opens in the Gontranno Sanctuary, with 47 Easing into the Adventure, shooting some melons, and visiting confession. The final hit of the game takes place inside the very same sanctuary.
  • The first and last missions of Contracts revolve around 47 being trapped in a building surrounded by special forces immediately after a successful hit.
  • Also, the end of Blood Money shows 47 about to carry out an assassination in a Chinese brothel, recalling the Hong Kong setting of the first missions in Codename 47.
  • In Absolution, both the tutorial and the achievement for completing the final mission are called "A Personal Contract".
    "From here on out, I shall only refer to her as 'my target'. I must not get personally involved."
    "I shall not refer to him as 'my target'. Nothing so clinical will do. This is personal."
• Bookcase Passage:
  • The first one is in Romania. Once Smith is feeling better, he'll lead you out to a secret entrance to Ort-Meyer's lab. He will get into an elevator and ride it up after a short conversation, revealing a hidden staircase within the shaft. In Contracts, the stairs are gone, and the basement is accessible via the elevator panel.
  • In "Invitation to a Party", it's a hidden wall panel leading to the embassy balcony. If you can find it, there's a spare tux and a super-rare W2000 rifle out there
  • Lord Beldingford owns a two-way mirror which allows him to spy on his maids while they're bathing. This ultimately proves his undoing, since 47 can use it to sneak into his master bedroom. There's another hidden trapdoor in the hedge maze. This dumps you into the wine cellar, circumventing the front door/staff entrance entirely. Finally, there are actual bookshelf passages that will give you the run of the house.
  • "A Vintage Year": The wine cellar below the Hacienda is also home to a drug lab. The door is disguised as a wine casket. It has two other secret passages, one connecting it to the Hacienda and the other to the docks.
  • There are two photographers at Lorne's party: one in the studio filming a bad softcore film, and one lounging beside a fake waterfall. You can quite easily kill/sedate this one and hide him in a tunnel between the two waterfalls. Help yourself to his clothes.
  • In the Blackwater Park penthouse (Absolution), there's a panic room entrance built into one of the walls. This one is easier to find since Layla goes in there herself.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Perhaps the most useful weapon across the entire spectrum is the humble silenced pistol. Most rifles are just too darn loud (Apologies to Huey Lewis).
  • As a corollary to that, the SLP.40 S can easily become your best friend in Blood Money. It is less complicated to use than 47's Silverballer and, since many guards come equipped with a regular SLP.40, ammo is very easy to come by. Ditto the silenced Beretta in the first two games.
  • Chokey chokey! One of the most useful bits of equipment is the simple fiber wire garrote. It's silent, can't be picked up by metal detectors or frisked, and is always sure to kill a target. In Absolution, using the fiber wire lets you automatically drag away bodies to hide. In Blood Money, 47 can use it to lift his victim on top of elevators, allowing easy concealment of the corpse.
  • In the rare instances in which it appears, you should use the stun gun liberally. It's fun, and you don't incur a penalty for this quick K.O. It's such a quick and dirty weapon that 47 isn't allowed to take it with him to the next mission, since it makes sedation way too easy.
  • In the gun store mission of Absolution where 47 must recover his Silverballers, he can sneak through the store and firing range for the key to the cases...or he can simply beat the local sharpshooter in a shooting competition, after which the store owner will reward him with the guns.
  • The ability to pick up random items in Absolution, which can give you either a handy improvised weapon or a quick and convenient way to distract guards.
  • In Blood Money pushing anyone on stairs or over the railing is a handy instant kill with the added bonus of looking like an accident, which means someone finding the body will not raise an alarm or impact your score.
  • In the World of Assassination games, the lockpick is incredibly useful in most levels. In fact, a standard load out for many players is a silenced pistol, a lockpick and a set of coins for distractions.
• Bouncer: Bouncers are a regular feature in Hitman and come in all shapes and sizes. You got your Jet Li lookalikes in China, the biker gang variety in Rotterdam, the mask-wearing gimps in Romania, the bald, black variety in Las Vegas, and the "Stone Cold" Steve Austin lookalikes in Chicago.
• Boom, Headshot!: If you have time, aim the crosshairs at an enemy's head in first-person view. They should drop dead. This even works on bosses.
• Borrowed Biometric Bypass:
  • That barcode on the back of cue ball's head isn't a fashion statement. If you try to get into Ort-Meyer's lair, the reader will scan it and ascertain that you are not Mr. 48, causing the room to fill with gas. Be smart and drag the body of the Mr. 48 over to the scanner. This will confuse Ort-Meyer and he will allow you in.
  • Defied in Hitman: Absolution. The biometric scanners you run into are state-of-the-art. Not only will using a dead enemy not work, but forcing a hostage's head into the scanner will ALSO fail, since the device can detect (presumably via pupil dilation and rapid eye movement) that they are under duress. The only way to trick a scanner is to either use disguises to trick an authorized person into opening it for you... or just walk up to a console and register yourself as authorized. Don't ask how you hacked the computer though; maybe the password was on a sticky-note attached to the monitor.
  • Hitman (2016) has an example in "Freedom Fighters" that's required to complete the mission the first time around. Sean Rose is the only one who can access the office containing the intel needed by means of a face scanner. There are two ways around this: Drag Rose into the basement and put his face up to the scanner or make a copy using the 3-D printer upstairs.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: Every time a rival assassin shows up, there's a hidden body somewhere nearby, like you'd need to do, and they can take about the same (or less) punishment as 47.
• Bottomless Bladder: NPCs visit the facilities so frequently that they should probably see a doctor about it. For practice runs, or when learning the area, the bathroom will likely be where you nab your first weapon/disguise.
• Bragging Rights Reward:
  • Attaining a Silent Assassin rating in Silent Assassin and Contracts unlocks a variety of guns for 47 to use. However, particularly in Contracts, most of these guns tend to be silenced versions, dual versions, or silenced dual versions of other weapons acquired throughout the games. Many of these are of little use to a player skilled enough to obtain them, seeing as how suppressed non-sniper rifles can't be concealed and dual pistols, submachineguns, and shotguns are incredibly noisy. Even dual silenced pistols are Awesome, but Impractical, seeing as how Contracts's leeway of a single shot during a Silent Assassin run is a moot point when you're firing off two shots at once.
  • Similarly, the World Of Assasination trilogy has truckloads of unlockable weapons and equipment, ranging from slightly different variants of the basic pistol to various cleverly (and sometimes hilariously) disguised explosives to random everyday objects used as melee weapons. Some of these are useful and some are clearly just for show.
• Briefcase Full of Money:
  • In Codename 47, the Agency can't get a fix on Boris' location, even in satellite view. Boris does all of his deals in Rotterdam, the biggest harbor in the world. The only way to find his ship, the Katarina Invanova, is to hide a GPS in a payment suitcase which is headed his way.
  • Two examples of it in Blood Money, both of which 47 can help himself to. Or you can just hide bombs in these, and let the couriers make their deliveries. Boom.
    1. Follow the money. "The Murder of Crows" kicks off with a diamonds exchange in New Orleans. Diana says the courier is headed for Mark Purayah's hideout, so it's a good place to start.
    2. The Aryan Nation is delivering some DNA samples to a wealthy Sheikh in Vegas. The black suitcase contains a generous amount of untraceable blood diamonds—perfect for Hendrik Schmutz, who is headed for South Africa once this is over.
  • In exchange for sparing his life, Agent Smith offers 47 "red suitcases" full of diamonds. He calls it a down payment for thwarting the assassination of President Stewart.
  • In Absolution, the ICA delivers a suitcase with $10 million dollars to Blake Dexter in exchange for Victoria. At the end of "Countdown", Victoria dumps the money over Blake's dead body before she and 47 leave.
• Bullet Time:
  • A Max Payne ability is present in the original Codename 47 as an easter egg press the scroll lock button to activate bullet time during gameplay. In Blood Money, the game will go into bullet time mode when 47 runs out of health; if you can achieve 3 headshots during this short period, you're given a second chance (but taking 1 more hit will result in instant death).
  • When 47 first awakens from his dead state and begins to stand up, the environment will be moving extra slow (similar to the near death slow down 47 experiences on any other mission as he dies).
• The Butcher:
  • The Sturrock Bros, Campbell and Malcolm. Of the two, Malcolm is more dangerous, since he's marked as a civilian on the interface map. If he spots you snooping around the attic, he will brandish a meat cleaver and charge at you, carving up your health meter with a few swipes.
  • "Butcher" is a rank the player will receive if they waste several people during the mission. It's actually a mark of shame, way below "Silent Assassin" and just a bit above "Mass Murderer" (everyone's dead).
  • 47 uses this as an alias in Budapest. "Mertzger", which is German for butcher.

C

• Cacophony Cover Up:
  • "Basement Killing": While in the laundry room, dump the Agency's smoke bomb down a chute. A herd of firefighters will come pouring out, leaving behind a spare uniform. Aha! Camouflage! The metal detectors will buzz as you go through it, but it's okay, because you're a big, strapping fireman with a metal ax and hat. The guards think that you're heading to an emergency, so they will leave you alone. As dramatically appropriate as it might be to sneak through the server room and surprise your target, you needn't bother. He'll try to sound the alarm, but there's no one to be alarmed, since they've all fled upstairs away from the fire scare. Take the axe and give him forty whacks.
  • "Shogun Showdown": The laser traps can be circumvented, but where's the fun in that? Play a practical joke on Hayomoto by tripping the alarm in his gallery. When the old man races downstairs to retrieve his treasure, he will find the mini-bomb which you helpfully left behind. Oops. Or you can blow up his escape helicopter.
    • Hayomoto won't budge if one of the door alarms is triggered, so if you would rather play it quiet, just trigger the alarm (which doesn't count as an Alert) and wait for his minions to herd downstairs. That will leave just one sentry between you and Hayomoto.
  • In Blood Money, loud noises can be used to mask your gunshots. This includes the execution scene during a rehearsal of Tosca.
  • "A House of Cards". Juvenile, but effective. (It will make you wish more locations had fire alarms.) The easy way to spook Tariq is to pull the fire alarm and then sneak into Tariq's room after his bodyguards herd him to safety. Another trick is to stick a bomb in Schmutz's suitcase and wait for Tariq to come have a look. BLAM. If you pull the fire alarm as you press the button, nobody will find his body.
  • Exploited by Mark Parchezzi in an effort to fend off Mr. 47. He sets off a bomb in the Oval Office when your confront him there. The bomb blast activates the sprinkler system and momentarily knocks 47 on his ass, allowing Mark to get away while Secret Service swarm the place.
• The Cake Is a Lie: Agent 47 is actually working for the man he's out to stop. Roll in a thunderous cacophony of drums. Script, pitch, and go!
  1. In C47, the mysterious 'client' is Dr. Ort-Meyer. He's testing 47's capabilities while also breaking the backs of his rivals.
  2. In SA, the client is Sergei, a Russian mob boss who is assembling pieces of an untraceable nuclear warhead.
  3. In Blood Money, The Franchise's mysterious boss is the same man spearheading a task force to capture 47.
  4. Killing Diana for Travis. Turns out all he really wanted was Victoria delivered back to ICA. The ending shows that 47 smelled a rat from the beginning, and purposely aimed for a non-vital area when he plugged Diana, which allows her to recover.
  5. Diana lampshades this in Hitman '16, saying that all the contracts they did up to that point are from perfectly legitimate sources (MI6, an Ether shareholder, Hamilton-Lowe and the Highmoore Family) but seem to serve some overarching purpose for a fixer behind the scenes.
• Camping a Crapper:
  • If you're ever at a loss at what to do, look for an alleyway or camp out in the nearest restroom. Eventually, some NPC will come out to uh... water the plants. It never fails.
  • In the Hitman series, if there's an available bathroom, it is almost always the best place to hide a body, and within the bathroom, toilet stalls are the best place to put them. (An outhouse makes a welcome appearance in "Attack of the Saints".) Oddly, random people tend to look into large body-sized containers with regularity, but will not consistently open an unlocked toilet stall door blocked by a corpse.
  • One of the easiest ways to isolate a target from Hitman (2016) onward is to get them to throw up in a nearby toilet. Once isolated, 47 can drown, shoot, or garrote his victim - all of which are standard challenges in every level.
• The Can Kicked Him: All levels from Hitman (2016) onward have the "Hold My Hair" challenge - assassinating a target via drowning. Typically, the simplest way to accomplish this is to spike the target's food or drink with an emetic poison, then follow them to the nearest toilet and dunk their head underwater when they lean over to throw up. As a bonus, drowning a target even counts as an accidental death.
• The Captain:
  • Captain Skip Muldoon is a target in Blood Money, along with his bodyguards.
  • Codename 47 included a captain on the crow's nest of Boris' ship. If things go according to plan, he should be your last target. If not, one of the surviving enemies will shut off the ship's engine, preventing you from leaving. In the remake, the Captain tries to talk Boris down once the police raid the ship. It doesn't end well for him.
• Captain Ersatz:
  • H:C47: No, the title for the seventh mission didn't come from a Lloyd Bridges comedy. The mansion is where Pablo has holed up for the day, snorting a mountain of cocaine. Pablo will go crazy on you with an M60 when you arrive, and he's a pretty good shot for someone shooting so wildly. When you do enough damage to him, he'll taunt you (endlessly). Once Pablo falls, a fresh batch of guards will enter the house and climb the stairs and fountain area; picking up Pablo's M60 will help you cut them down. (Trivia: Despite being based on Tony Montana, he in fact Colombian; ironically, Tony himself hates Colombians.)
  • Vinnie Sinistra is also somewhat based on Montana. Both are Cubans who arrived on the Mariel Boatlift. Mrs. Sinistra is also a parody of Elvira, Tony's wife.
  • The bodyguards in the Jacuzzi with Charlie (a blonde, Asian, and brunette), along with Charlie himself, are a reference to Charlie's Angels.
  • Sergei's appearance is likely inspired by the antagonist in the Schwarzenegger film Eraser. The character in the film even shares the same first name.
  • The Meat King may be a reference to the character "Fat Bastard" from Austin Powers, as they are both Scottish and both morbidly obese. His inspiration may also have come from the character "Pearl", an obese vampire in the film Blade. Like Sturrock, Pearl hosts lavish S&M parties and tortures his victims in the hideout. Also like Sturrock, Pearl is confined to his bed and helpless.
  • Cayne resembles Le Chiffre from the remake of Casino Royale starring Daniel Craig.
  • Wade is modeled on David Carradine's character in Kill Bill. (Before his death, Carradine was planned to voice Blake Dexter, but the role eventually went to his brother Keith.)
  • Hitman's Christmas '16 mission: Kill the bumbling burglars from Home Alone. Marv even giggles each time he robs a trinket or floods a sink.
• Camera Perspective Switch: From the second game onwards the player can switch from third- to first-person at any time. Certain actions force one perspective or the other.
• Camping a Crapper:
  • Pretty much everybody has to go sooner or later, and a person standing in a room by themselves with their face against the wall just screams "Easy kill!" Even if your primary target doesn't take bathroom breaks, odds are his personal bodyguards will so you can easily get their clothes and go anywhere you like.
  • You'd think you could just wait in the Cheng Chau bathroom and kick down the door in a surprise attack, but the Chief didn't rise in rank by being stupid. If you're in the bathroom after everyone's entered the restaurant, the Chief will come and kick you out. You could, of course, just kill him then, but then the Blue Lotus negotiator will take off, causing a Game Over. Funny how one of Hitmans very first bathrooms can't be used for ambush.
• Casino Park: The Thermal Bath Hotel has a casino on the second floor. If you track Fritz down to the casino or restaurant, you can initiate a conversation with him to see what type of man he is and also to hear some cool lines delivered by David Bateson. (Always bet on black.) Blood Money used the Shamal Hotel and Casino for a nighttime mission, but you still can't play the tables.
• Cerebus Rollercoaster: Take a look at Blood Money and Hitman 2016: The scenes are high-end fashion shows and supermodel pool parties. Now look at Absolution: It had that dirty and sometimes western feel to it. A gruffer, scarred, tougher-looking Hitman starred in that game.
• Changing Clothes Is a Free Action: In Hitman, 47 changes clothes insanely fast, and doesn't have to transfer his gear to a new outfit either. It takes a few seconds, meaning that if the coast isn't clear you can be caught unawares by guards.
• Character Title: Mostly averted with the tiny exception of Absolution, where we learn that as part of the urban legends that surrounds him, 47 is indeed known as "a Hitman", with an emphasis on "a", for the fact that is known that many of them used to exists.
• Checkpoint Starvation:
  • Depending on the difficulty level, you can only save a certain amount of times during a single mission, or sometimes not at all. In SA, you're still rewarded with a bonus save if you rescue Agent Smith or Mei Ling, which is nice, as those missions are easily the most grueling of the game.
  • The original Codename 47 had no save states OR checkpoints. If you screwed up just once, you were likely to end up being riddled with bullets and sent back to the beginning of the mission; some of the more elaborate missions could be 30-50 minutes or more in length. Later games let you save in the middle of a mission, and (on the regular difficulty) allowed 47 to sustain much more damage before dying.
• Chef of Iron:
  • Dress up as a chef and make a dish to die for. Literally.
  • In H:C47, you may get attacked by one of the chefs wielding a meat cleaver in Hong's place.
  • Hayamoto Jr's chef is packin' heat and won't hesitate to fill any trespassing Gaijins full of lead.
• Chekhov's Gun: In-game, some of the items picked up can suddenly prove useful later on. The wayward brick you found on the ground? Hurl it at your target's bodyguard so you can kill them without losing your rating. The poisonous plant you found growing? Use it to gas the server room so you can lockpick a locker in peace.
• Choke Holds:
  • The Hitman series plays this in a realistic way with the fiber wire; granted, it's very quick and easy, but the fact that 47 suddenly crushes his victim's windpipe very forcibly means it's always fatal.
  • Played somewhat straighter in Absolution, which adds chokeholds to your repertoire. While standard goons go down in about six seconds, the player must to surprise them, enemies always struggle and have to be wrestled, and 47 has the option of breaking their neck if they're too uncooperative.
• CIA Evil, FBI Good: Inverted. Smith is an upstanding (if incompetent) CIA agent who has the best interests of his country at heart. The terror ringleader of Blood Money on the other hand, is a former Director of the FBI. This further complicated by Cayne's vast network of friends in the other agencies—including one Agent Martinez, a bag man for the CIA.
• Cigar Chomper:
  • Two of 47's 'parents', Pablo and Boris, are shown lighting up.
  • When we first meet the Don in Chile, he tosses a cigar stub into the river. This man is a threat to public health, in more ways than one.
  • Alexander Cayne is shown rummaging for a cigar during his interview, and gets very agitated at having to ask a nurse to light it.
  • The leader of the Saints, LaSandra Dixon, steps out of a bus with a stogie clenched between her teeth. Now that's an entrance. Dexter is also shown puffing on a cigar in the comic-book renderings.
• Climbing Climax: Many targets seem to have an allergy to the first floor. Lorne, Hayomoto Sr., and Blake Dexter are some prominent examples.
• Clone Degeneration:
  • The Mr. 38 "Betas" are only half formed, with missing limbs and exposed muscle tissue on their face. When we do meet an earlier model of Hitman, Mr. 17, he appears perfectly normal apart from a lack of independent thought. The cult leader in Punjab manages to brainwash 17 into coming over to his side.
  • Blood Money, in turn, reveals that Dr. Ortmeyer's cloning techniques are being "circulated" through the hands of various organizations including The Franchise... but due to missing details, or maybe some special ingredient (the "47th chromosome") known only to Ortmeyer, all of the clones are flawed. Specifically, they're all albino and mysteriously die after one or two years.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience:
  • There's no mistaking the Red Dragon Triads and the Blue Lotus Triads.
  • 17 is similar to his little "brother" in appearance, the difference being that he wears sunglasses and a golden tie. Much like 47 did with Tom the Tailor, 17 has imprinted on the Russian mob in his style of dress.
  • In Pine Cone rehab, you can tell the goombas apart from their colored robes.
  • "The Murder of Crows": There are 3 types of bird suits wandering around Bourbon Street. The yellow ones are guards, hired to keep watch over the "Crow's Nest". They won't bother you unless you sneak in or attack them. Diana tells you to pay close attention to the bird in red: This is Billy Jack, a courier employed by The Crows. He was assigned to transport a suitcase containing diamonds to an albino, who is The Franchise's point-man on this operation. The black birds are your targets, and are the hardest to find. Note also the Red, Blue, and Green neon signs above the music bars. The bouncers won't let you in the doors if you're wearing anything other than a partygoer's outfit, and it's got to match the color of the sign. (A waiter costume will also work.) Once you're inside, nobody cares what you wear.
• Combat, Diplomacy, Stealth: Most missions give you the options of run-and-gunning (at the risk of killing civilians), disguises (which sometimes let you access areas or talk to people whom you couldn't otherwise), or avoiding or evading conflict in the first place via stealth.
• Combat Stilettos:
  • Charlie's bodyguards are wearing color-specific bikinis and high heels. Two of the Franchise assassins in Blood Money are also wearing heels.
  • The Saints aren't really dressed appropriately for the jungle.
  • If you corner Layla in the panic room (again in Absolution) A cutscene will be triggered in which Layla strips to her underwear and high heels and tries to seduce 47. She will then whip out a gun and unload it. At this point you have a few seconds to save yourself. Should you lose the quick-draw duel, Layla looms over 47 and drives her heel through the camera lens.
• Confessional:
  • Shortly after taking control of 47 in the prologue, talk to your friend and mentor Father Vittorio. 47 needs to speak to him about his troubles and Father Vittorio tells 47 to meet him confession.
  • In California, 47 says the password (11:45) and meets with Diana in person (she's in the confessional booth) for his briefing.
• Conspicuously Public Assassination: "Accidents" happen every day.
  • You either play it loud or quiet. The funny thing about "The Jacuzzi Job" in particular is that it's supposed to look like a robbery gone bad. However, if you get a good rating, then security will find a safe broken into, the power knocked out, a sopping-wet, naked corpse hidden behind a vibrating bed, with a dead identical twin in the basement and a half dozen clueless witnesses. Nope, nothing odd about that.
  • "The Murder of Crows". If you pop Raymond but neglect Angelina for too long, she'll climb aboard the Secretary's float and slit his throat. Yes, she is that crazy.
• Context-Sensitive Button: Under the Hitman control scheme, pressing the "Use" key may cause the player character to perform any one of literally hundreds of actions, depending on context. Walk up to certain NPCs with your hands empty and "Use" will start a conversation with them. Sneaking up on them from behind with a pistol drawn or looking down on them through the roof hatch of an elevator with your garrotte equipped will yield far less benevolent options.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The Red Dragons symbol is on the Meat King's opium pipes. Looks as if Lee Hong was supplying him with opium. Seems legit, considering how vast his enterprise was in 1999.
  • Assorted radio reports in Hitman: Absolution:
    • A radio broadcast that can be heard during "A Personal Contract" mentions the death of Richard Strong, the target of the pre-order bonus "Sniper Challenge" mission.
    • In the Shangri-La Garden ("Run For Your Life"), the dial is tuned to Coast to Coast AM (or something like it), and the host is mulling over the suspicious death of Alexander Cayne.
    • The announcer in "Attack of the Saints" states that The King of Chinatown was Don Fernando Delgado's main buyer.
  • Upon close examination, the Praetorian Elite Mooks from the final battle of Absolution are albino, and appear to be remarkably identical in appearance. This, combined with their unique Made of Iron durability (it take about 20 assault rifle rounds to kill one of them), may be a hint that they're Class II clones, like the Franchise's Mark series were.
  • Yuki Yamazaki in "Situs Inversus". Her backstory explaining her rise to power begins with the gang wars that resulted from 47's assassinations of Masahiro Hayamoto and his son in Silent Assassin.
  • In Hitman 2, one of the Ark Society patrons mentions having once attended a "Heaven and Hell"-themed masquerade party.
    • The Yardbirds became infamous for their daring robbery of the Shamal Casino in Las Vegas, where they made off with hundreds of millions of dollars. 47 carried out an unrelated contract in the same casino in Hitman: Blood Money.
• Contrived Coincidence: Nearly every mission of every game will include at least one; a model working closely with a target looks almost exactly like 47, or a target has a taste for deadly fugu fish, or a fondness for a vintage microphone notoriously prone to fatal electrical surges. In her briefings Diana will often take an amused tone when describing these coincidences, but she never seems to notice just how often they occur.
• Coup de Grâce Cutscene: The White Room.
  • Codename 47 delivers a Neck Snap to Doctor Ortmeyer after the player shoots him. It's actually the opening cutscene for the first level in Contracts.
  • After the final shootout in Silent Assassin, 47 simply caps Sergei in the melon to finish him off.
  • At the end of Absolution, 47 delivers a final gunshot to Travis after blowing open the crypt he's hiding in.
• Covert Group with Mundane Front:
  • The Wang Fou (Emperor's Garden) Restaurant is Lee Hong's stronghold. The 2nd floor is off limits to the public, apart from the johns. The basement contains some torture instruments as well as a huge weapons cache. Hong's mansion lies at the far end, across a moat.
  • Pablo sells curios as a cover for his drug operation. The Agency learns one of his planes crashed in the jungle; onboard the plane was a religious idol stolen from the U'Wa, and they would really like it back.
  • Fritz Fuchs is masquerading as a traveling dentist, with a corner office in one of the towers of Hotel Galar.
  • Ignore the loading screen for "Gunrunner's Paradise". You're not after him—yet. Instead, you're looking for Ivan, the criminal with the strangest bio. How many criminals do you know of who run circuses?
  • In Contracts, he is replaced with Rutgert Van Leuven who runs a counterfeiting ring out of his biker bar.
  • You can't take weapons into "The Setup", but hey, what would any asylum be if they didn't stock up on semi-automatic machine guns and shotguns and whatnot all over the place? Well, it'd be a normal asylum, which this one isn't.
  • In Kuala Lumpur, your next major task is to eliminate one Charlie Sidjan, a devious (and very talented) hacker. He has managed to steal a very important piece of code from the United States and the client wants you to find it, plus destroy all records of it. Charlie's corporation, Carniwarez Inc., is located inside one of the Petronas Towers.
  • The Delgado Vineyard is owned and operated by one of Pinochet's ex-intelligence officers and his son. Here the Delgado family produce their famous "El Diablo" wine as well as smuggle cocaine through the cellar. According to the Chilean wine critics, El Diablo is pretty foul.
  • The Gators run drugs up and down the Mississippi, using the tourist steamboat Emily as a cover.
  • Sheikh Mohammad Bin Faisal Al-Khalifa, commonly shortened to Sheikh Mohammad, is the CEO of APEX International, a corporation located worldwide of the pharmaceutical industry. The Sheikh has been suspected to be involved in biological warfare and perhaps cloning as well.
  • Vaana Ketlyn is a famous Romanian circus performer and party hostess around Nevada. She is also secretly an illegal arms dealer in league with her lover, CIA agent Anthony Martinez. She hosts the Heaven/Hell parties in "A Dance with the Devil".
  • Birdie parks his mobile headquarters in a lot behind the "Lucky Ducky Dumpling".
  • Hallelujah, the police are shown actually doing their job in and around the Vixen Club, investigating the death of a girl found with a Hawaii postcard on her person. The staff insists that what the dancers do "on their own time" is not their problem. (Forgive us if we don't take the mob-owned nudie bar at their word.) Looks like the net is closing tight on Dom Osmond, even if you killed him already: the cops are seen combing through the basement with flashlights, not far from where Wade practices his grisly art. Dump a cadaver over the railing and at the officers' feet to close this case.
  • The Cougars barely qualify as a gang. They each work day jobs, operating out of a small city block which includes an auto mechanic, plumber's, and barber. Each time Dexter drives another store owner out of business, the Cougars move in. Colvin has an office that on the upper level of the Green Mountain, a convenience store run by his girlfriend; Gavin and Landon are always at the auto shop; Mason and Luke can be found hosting a party at the barber shop.
• Cradling Your Kill:
  • If you've poisoned or tranquilized someone.
  • Players do this to Dr. Ortmeyer seconds before 47 snaps his neck ("You broke my heart, my son."), and again to Diana after he shoots her non-lethally.
• Crapsaccharine World:
  • Rural Sicily is shown to be something of an Arcadia in Silent Assassin...when you aren't being beaten and/or extorted by mobsters who can barely squeeze their fat asses into their sports car.
  • Hope, South Dakota is an ironic name. It's where hope goes to die.
• Creator Cameo:
  • It is interesting to note that the ICA logo is based on the original MI5 emblem, replacing the characters in its three corners (originally M, I, and 5) from left to right with IOI, for IO Interactive.
  • Ort-Meyer's car (the one you can escape in) has an emblem on the grill reading "IOI", short for IO Interactive of course. Same goes for the sedan you're supposed to bug in "Deadly Cargo" (the one which belongs to Rutgert's lieutenant). Campbell Sturrock is also processing and shipping IOI brand meat.
  • An Easter Egg in "Asylum Aftermath": In the lab adjacent to 47's "fathers" all floating in cryo-pods, there's another set of pods with the IO producers' names engraved on them.
  • Giles, the VIP in "Beldingford Manor", bears a resemblance to Jesper Kyd, the composer of the Hitman soundtracks. This might explain why he talks in an American accent.
  • "Death of a Showman" is surely a reference to Death of a Salesman, but did you know that Jesper Kyd scored the music of Death of a Saleswoman?
  • In "The Meat King's Party", another (male) developer's face is included on Malcolm's candlelit altar, as a joke.
  • There are signs at the Shamal (particularly a big one in the lobby) that read "Allan Hansen's Street Magic". Allan Hansen is one of the developers of the Hitman series and Freedom Fighters (2003).
  • IOI animator Barbara Bernad recorded the off-key vocal performance for the song Eve sings.
    "Boy, is she hot! Terrible singer, though."
  • In the White House level, in the security room next to the metal detectors, there's a newspaper with the text: "PPOT ROCKS! The Commodore 64 revival band gets major breakthru in the U.S." Indeed. One of the game's programmers, Theo Engell-Nielsen, plays synth in that band.
  • In the ad following "Amendment XXV", the two boxers that fight it out at "IOI Grand Palace" are actually Martin Guldbaek and Rune Brinckmeyer, two programmers that worked on the previous Hitman games. Brinckmeyer sat out Silent Assassin, though. They also programmed Freedom Fighters.
  • In the final level, "Requiem", the name on the gravestones is "Guldbrandsen", a talented programmer who worked on all the previous Hitman, Freedom Fighters and some others (hence the dates "1998-2004").
• Creepy Crows:
  • Cawing outside of the Gontanno Sanctuary in the final level of SA. Blood Money opens with them fluttering around the gravestones at 47's funeral.
  • "The Crows" are a pair of assassins, Raymond and Angelina, who have a loose affiliation with The Franchise. They're both wearing bird costumes which ordinarily would give away their positions, but blend in well for this nighttime mission.
• Crowd Panic: Civilian NPCs panic and flee at anything vaguely violent or seeing someone with a gun in a non-military context. They'll also run if they find evidence of your handiwork, i.e. corpses or in some cases bloodstains. In SA, the civilians will give you more headaches than the guards in most cases.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Most "accidental" deaths are especially gruesome and ironic compared to the alternative of being garroted or shot, such as killing Dr. Green by dropping him into a pit of pigs in Absolution.
• Cutscene Incompetence:
  • Cutscenes eat up way too much time in Silent Assassin. It is important that you skip the cutscene which follows after you shoot Sergei through the confessional window; if you don't, then most times Sergei's SP12 Shotgun will eat through your health in an instant (although sometimes he will just bolt upstairs). If you skip the cutscene, it will keep him from firing at you roughly 95% of the time.
  • If you follow Eve into the office after she invites you and she pulls out her stiletto before you can kill her, you are dead — even if you manage to kill her before the cutscene with her knifing 47 to death appears.
  • As you enter the Oval Office, a scene will play, and 47 refuses to plug Mark in the forehead when he has the chance. Instead, Mark activates a mine hidden behind right behind you, and you'll wind up chasing his pasty ass up to the roof.
  • Twice in Absolution. First attempting to garrote Sanchez, then sneaking up on Skurky while standing on a puddle of water.
• Cutscene Power to the Max: Inverted, if anything. 47, despite being treated by fans as a Memetic Badass as being practically unkillable, he is not a One-Man Army in the cutscenes. He is a stealth expert, and while he has hand-to-hand combat and has trained with all types of guns since he was a teen, there's nothing he can do against large groups of people out for his blood.
• Cutting Off the Branches:
  • The opening to Hitman (2016) kicks off with a montage of 47's kills before that game, one from each entry in the series. According to canon, the Red Dragon ambassador was shot with a sniper rifle (not poisoned), Fritz Fuchs was drowned in the hotel pool, Junior ate fish spiked with fugu, Don Delgado was throttled while playing the cello, and Dom was shot from behind a security mirror with an unsilenced Silverballer (which is strange, as 47 didn't have it for that mission).
  • No matter how you completed Marrakesh in 2016, the interview between Strandberg and Pam Kingsley goes through, as in Bangkok, NPC's talk about it as if it were recent news, specifically mentioning the Precision F-Strike he employs to rile the crowd up.

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