How IO Interactive Developed Hitman’s Bruce Lee Mission

Back in September, Hitman: World of Assassination developer IO Interactive launched the Bruce Lee mission pack, its latest celebrity crossover mission.

The elusive target mission, which is also known as The Infiltrator, features the deceased actor and martial artist in a role befitting of the legacy he left behind.

“Whenever you’re working with a celebrity, you want to be true to what they represent and who they are, and also who they are to the public and to their fans,” IO Interactive’s Lead & Senior Technical Designer Toke Krainert told me back in October.

Previous celebrities that IO Interactive has featured as targets in Hitman include Mads Mikkelsen, Gary Busey, and everyone’s favourite master of death scenes, Sean Bean. However, while each of those actors were featured as targets for Agent 47 to eliminate, Bruce Lee is instead an ally in the mission.

“With Bruce Lee in particular, since he is a cultural icon, and also since he’s deceased, we wanted to be extra careful to treat it respectfully. So there was a lot of emphasis on presenting him in the way we would all like to remember him, and that meant not having him as a target for instance.”

The Infiltrator mission, which reuses part of Hitman’s iconic Bangkok location as the set piece, features Lee acting as an operative attempting to infiltrate the Hong Kong crime syndicate known as Concord Union.

Lee’s mission involves entering a fighting competition, with the overall winner being granted a face-to-face audience with Concord’s leader, the real target of the level.

Krainert went on to explain how “players would feel pretty bad or conflicted about killing Bruce Lee in a game, and we wouldn’t want that. We’d much rather emphasise him being in a classic role for him. Very Enter the Dragon-inspired, where we tried to make him the hero in the story, and put you there on the sidelines to enjoy Bruce Lee being Bruce Lee.”

“We want to display Bruce Lee being Bruce Lee”

The Infiltrator mission features two different styles of play, one being what Krainert explains was more aligned with Hitman’s traditional gameplay, and one that more emphasises the Bruce Lee aspects of the mission.

“One of the challenges when doing a mission where we didn’t want our celebrity to be the target was asking ‘what is their role?’,” Krainert explains. “We want to display Bruce Lee being Bruce Lee, we want him to matter in the mission, but we also don’t want to make it too punishing so that he will immediately be eliminated by an NPC. We also didn’t want you to have to escort him around, we all hate escort quests, right?

“So, we experimented a bit with different ideas, different prototypes, and found out that having him actually fight would both be the best way to represent Bruce Lee as himself, but also a way to add new gameplay and make him relevant in the mission.

“We explored these different ways of interacting with it, from very Hitman things like dressing up as the judge and disqualifying opponents, or poisoning the opponents so they can’t fight, or rearranging the fight schedule so you can flip the scales in your advantage, to the more ‘Bruce Lee-ish’ things like fighting as one of the competitors and knocking out his opposition, or if Bruce Lee is actually drugged when it’s time to fight, then actually fighting in his stead.

“These all felt like really cool things to be able to do. In this way, we managed to turn this mission into a fresh gimmick on the Hitman missions.”

If you haven’t had time to check out the Bruce Lee mission in Hitman: World of Assassination yet, there’s still time. The Infiltrator is still free to access in-game until 20th November. The paid DLC content is also available until this date, at which point it’ll be delisted from the store.