20 years ago today, Agent 47 embarked on what many consider the best adventure of his career and earned a ton of bloody cash. Here’s what Hitman: Blood Money looked like.
Hitman expanded its gameplay with each subsequent game, and fans will say that it came close to the perfect formula in the sequel called Blood Money. The game that came out on this day in 2006 enriched Hitman with several welcome additions.
First of all, the game punished players for a violent, Rambo approach by giving less payoff at the end of each mission if the player was careless. The player needed money for new weapons and upgrading them, but the weapons themselves were not necessary for eliminations because Agent 47 in Blood Money could cause accidents which would “accidentally” kill the characters.
He was also included in the game notice system which was transferred from mission to mission. For example, if the player committed a crime in the presence of witnesses, or was recorded by a camera, in the next mission the characters could recognize him more quickly. Other novelties included hiding corpses in chests, and this was the last Hitman game with a first-person view (not counting the Sniper titles).
The levels in Blood Money were the reason why the game was played more than once. We had 12 missions in total (plus an epilogue), set in various locations, from the wine cellars of Chile to the luxurious casinos of Las Vegas. How was this Hitman an intergenerational titlein some levels it used the power of the new consoles to show loads of people – about a hundred of them on the screen.
The levels in Blood Money were the reason why the game was played more than once.
The game received excellent ratings and enchanted fans of the series. In less than two months, 1.5 million copies were sold. By 2011, that number had grown to 2.1 million copies. Today, this game is playable on most current platforms, as the original on PC and as part of the Hitman HD Enhanced Collection on PlayStation and Xbox consoles.
From 2024 there is also Blood Money – Reprisal, a mobile port for Android and iOS. It is the closest we have come to a true remaster of the game, and novelties from later Hitman games (mini-map, Instinct mode, etc.) have been added to this version.