Hitman: Codename 47

Hitman: Codename 47 is presented from the third-person perspective, but the control setup is similar to a first-person shooter as 47's movements are restricted to turning, strafing and moving forward and backward. Each level takes place in a semi-open world environment which is populated with non-player characters such as civilians and armed guards. Although mission criteria may vary, the goal is generally to find 47's assigned target and kill them by any means possible. Though the path may appear linear, it is possible through various ways to accomplish the mission and approach a target directly without eliciting a violent reprisal.

The game essentially emphasises stealth and silent kills without raising alerts, giving the player a higher financial reward for doing so. Penalties in the form of financial deductions are given, for example if the player kills civilians, but none of the guards or other enemies are slain. As the money is used to purchase weapons and ammo during the course of the game, this pressures the player to utilise stealth, disguise, and melee based mechanics for the most cost-effective method to take out targets.

The game opens in 1999, as a mysterious man code-named "Project 47" awakens in the basement of a sanatorium to an unidentified man talking over a loudspeaker. Under the man's guidance, 47 completes a training course that tests his athletic, firearms, and assassination skills, before killing the guards and escaping from the sanatorium, much to his observer's joy. A year later, 47 has joined the International Contract Agency (ICA) – a global organization that specializes in performing assassinations for various clients – and has been assigned the identity of "Agent 47" and a handler, Diana Burnwood. It is not explained precisely how his recruitment took place.

Over the course of the year, 47 completes contracts that see him killing Triad crime boss Lee Hong in Hong Kong, after weakening his position by provoking a gang war; cocaine trafficker Pablo Belisario Ochoa in Colombia, through a staged drug raid; Austrian mercenary Frantz Fuchs in Budapest, who was planning to detonate a bomb during an international conference; and Kazakh gunrunner Arkadij Jegorov in Rotterdam, who was paranoid about the imminent arrival of 47 and had activated a nuclear warhead on his ship. After each successful assassination, 47 finds letters on his targets talking about himself, a project about an "experimental human", and a man named Professor Ort-Meyer.

Hitman: Codename 47 was created by Danish developer IO Interactive. Early on, the team conceptualised a fantasy massively multiplayer online game (MMO) entitled Rex Dominus; however, Danish film studio Nordisk Film, which IO Interactive was partnered with at the time, asked the team to cease production on Rex Dominus and "test [themselves]" by developing a "simple shooter" instead. As such, the team opted for a run-and-gun action game, as it took less time to develop compared to an MMO, drawing inspiration from John Woo films, such as Hard Boiled and The Killer. They turned to develop for personal computers (PCs), because they were unable to acquire development kits for consoles, and had also found interest in the steady increase of PCs' 3D graphics capabilities.

A part of the development on the game, which would later become Hitman: Codename 47, was the creation of the Glacier, the studio's proprietary game engine that fit their needs; co-founder Andersen stated: "Since killing was the main theme of the game, we wanted to do something special. [...] Standard 'death animations' just looked too static so some of the coders tried to see if they could use real-time inverse kinematics for the falling bodies. The first versions ran terribly slowly until one of the programmers figured out a way to fake the whole calculation."

Hitman: Codename 47 received "mixed or average reviews" according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. Jim Preston of NextGen called it "A deeply flawed masterpiece that will, nonetheless, reward forgiving gamers." Jake The Snake of GamePro said, "Though Rambo wannabes will feel pinned down by the game's realism, this captivating title oozes with enough seedy atmosphere and tense action to satisfy the most jaded gamer." Michael Lafferty of GameZone gave it seven out of ten, saying that "The violence is a little excessive."

The game received a "Silver" sales award from the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA), indicating sales of at least 100,000 units in the UK. In April 2009, Square Enix revealed that Hitman had surpassed half a million sales globally.