The best non-Hitman game from Hitman’s devs wouldn’t have happened if it didn’t blow EA execs’ minds and ‘low expectations’ with a hocus-pocus demo powered mostly by dreams

These days, we indelibly associate IO Interactive with the Hitman series, but back when the studio was young we… well, we associated it with the Hitman series. It’s been making Hitman for a while, starting with its first game, Hitman: Codename 47, all the way back in 2000.

But after releasing Hitman 2: Silent Assassin two years later, IO zigged where you thought it would zag: it released Freedom Fighters, a squad-based third-person shooter set in a Soviet-occupied USA. Its claim to fame was its rather excellent battle system, where the overall battle was made up of all sorts of smaller skirmishes between different squads and soldiers, and that made the whole thing feel very alive indeed.

It was great, is what I’m saying, and it almost didn’t get past the suits at its publisher, EA. In an interview with Edge magazine, lead designer Mads Prahm recalls that EA had some serious doubts that the Hitman guys could pull off an action-packed shooter. To be fair, they had good reason to think so: “For the first year or so, I remember we really struggled,” said Prahm.

“Making a fast-paced, very casual console game with completely different controls, movement schemes and AI for the characters… There was a lot of pressure to deliver something that the game didn’t really look like.”

A year in, and IO mostly had a lot of barren levels. “There was no action. There were a lot of empty levels, but the gameplay wasn’t there at all.” To allay its fears, EA decided that IO would have to throw together something that could serve as proof, essentially, that the studio actually knew what it was doing.

Prahm ginned up something to show the suits out of loose music and gameplay footage and, miraculously, that was enough for EA. When IO actually had a working, playable prototype to show them a few months later, EA was even more stunned.

“I remember they had very low expectations,” recalls Prahm, which perhaps ended up helping IO, “because we had brought something that they hadn’t expected to see.” EA gave the team the green light and even conscripted Prahm onto what he calls an “improvised press tour”. The rest is history: IO got cracking on its now-more-solid vision for what Freedom Fighters would be, and it turned out to be—for my money—the best non-Hitman game the studio ever made.