Hitman: IO Interactive Says a Big Yes to More Internet Celebrity Targets

IO Interactive wants more internet famous people on Agent 47’s list. The studio added Jacksepticeye, real name Seán William McLoughlin, to Hitman: World of Assassination as a limited-time elusive target on 29 October, and it is treating that as a starting point rather than a one-off.

Mission writer Jen Simpkins, speaking to PCGamesN about building the mission around what she called the latent horror of the content creation space, was asked whether more online creators might follow. The answer was a big yes.

“The internet is a weird place full of fascinating characters to take inspiration from”

— Jen Simpkins

Celebrity targets have been a cornerstone of the game’s post-launch run for years. Gary Busey and Conor McGregor both took their turn, and Eminem hired 47 to kill Slim Shady across December 2025, in a distorted version of the Hokkaido hospital rebuilt as an asylum, complete with a lethal serving of Mom’s Spaghetti. That one tied itself to The Death of Slim Shady, so the mission had a story to tell before anyone picked up a weapon. Moving from musicians and actors to YouTubers and streamers is a smaller step than it sounds.

It is also a riskier one. McGregor was pulled from the game after being found liable for sexually assaulting Nikita Hand in 2018, and the wider industry record is not encouraging: Overwatch’s Sinatraa skin, the NICKMERCS bundle that Call of Duty removed, the Payday 2 collaboration with H3H3 that is still drawing review bombs. Creators generate scandal at a higher rate than film actors because their entire output is unscripted. A limited-time mission is the safest version of this bet, since it expires on its own and nothing has to be patched out later. I would still want a contract clause rather than a handshake, because the removal is the expensive part.

The timing says something about where Hitman sits in IO’s schedule. Agent 47’s game is in its guest-star phase while the studio’s development attention is elsewhere, and elusive targets are the cheapest way to keep a live game in the conversation. CEO Hakan Abrak has said the studio will return to the Hitman franchise properly after 007 First Light and Project Fantasy, with systems rebuilt from the ground up rather than layered onto the existing trilogy.

That return may be closer than the roadmap suggested. David Bateson, the voice of Agent 47, told a RetroGameCon audience in November that Hitman 4 is in active development, while being open about knowing nothing else, since the studio has told him nothing about the plot. Project Fantasy lost Xbox as publisher over the summer and is still early, so the order of those two projects is no longer obvious.

The elusive target model is now IO’s house style, and it travels. Abrak has confirmed the studio will continue supporting 007 First Light with free Tactical Simulation content, challenges, gadgets and upgrades, plus new story missions bringing back Bawma, played by Lenny Kravitz, with Bond operating as a full double 0. That game launched on 27 May, has passed three million copies, and is the most expensive thing IO has made, with a Switch 2 version still due this year.

Guest stars have become the only way this brand expands outside games. The cancelled Hitman TV adaptation was announced in 2017 with Derek Kolstad writing and quietly died, with Kolstad saying earlier this year that it is dead in the water. There is no Hitman film, no series, and no sign of either, so a famous person walking into a level for a limited window is the whole crossover strategy.

I think that is fine, and better than the alternative. A rotating target that disappears is a lighter commitment than a permanent cosmetic bundle tied to someone’s public behaviour, and the format has produced the funniest missions in the game precisely because it does not have to be defended for a decade.

What IO has not said is who comes next. The obvious candidates are creators with a public persona built on something performable, because the Eminem mission worked by staging a man against his own alter ego rather than putting a celebrity model in a level and calling it content. I would rather they keep choosing targets with that kind of internal conflict than chase whoever has the largest subscriber count this quarter.

Jacksepticeye’s mission has already closed, and no follow-up has been named or dated.

Read also, IO has explained how it built its vision for a younger Bond: a Hitman pitch opened the door at MGM, shooting and driving had to be written from scratch, and the studio built the origin story from Ian Fleming’s novels rather than any single film.