They have always been about killing objectively awful people but the third mission in the first of the reboot trilogy is literally about killing a corrupt banker and a reactionary general involved in what is heavily implied to be a color revolution bankrolled by Swedish capitalists and the CIA.
I’ve been banging on this drum here and elsewhere since the first game came out. There’s definitely some people on the Hitman writing team with at least a good understanding of parapolitical history and likely actual leftist politics.
There’s plenty of main characters and mission plots that relate to real events like the one you mentioned. Dalias Margolis is pretty much straight up Ghislaine Maxwell - they just made her father and actual Israeli general instead of a newspaper owning Mossad spy. Dawood Rangan is almost certainly supposed to be Dawood Ibrahim with his links to terrorism, massive public ego, history of cricket fixing and lower level Mumbai gangster history. Jordan Cross is pretty clearly Jared Leto in looks, personality, and weird nepo-baby intelligence connections through his father. And so on…
By the time you get into the non-target characters and all the little schemes, controversies, and historical backgrounds of characters that NPCs in the crowds talk about the knowledge and references run really deep.
Great games.
Woke ruined hitman
it’s been a while since i played nu-Hitman 1 & 2 but i remember a throwaway line by a guard in the first mission at the beach house where he comments that “left-wing ecoterrorism must pay well” that gave me a stunlock
Well, it helps make it fun if you’re murdering some really awful people. I don’t think the vast majority would revel in being forced to kill innocent and/or sympathetic types.
Regardless, the latest games have been remarkably good.
the typical american thing to do is make them evil arabs/muslims or russians
except now they come with the nuance of
he was a revolutionary… noble ambitions… but then he became corrupt and terroristic
Good point. Can’t believe I forgot you can have reactionary caricatures as villains too.
I miss when the villains were always Nazis.
even that was a media push from the US to separate themselves from Nazism in the public eye, while in actuality they were promoting ex-Nazis and their allies to positions of power all around the globe
Yeah, it was definitely politically motivated, but… at least it wasn’t nearly as xenophobic and bigoted as later Cold War garbage. At least the Bad Guys were actual bad guys, not a terrible caricature of The Commies.
