ArkaEvren

GAME · 2000 · DENMARK

Hitman: Codename 47

11 archived facts 5 topics

Agent 47, the bald, barcoded assassin of Hitman: Codename 47, took shape through early concepts that looked nothing like his final design. His face and voice both come from actor David Bateson, and details from the games and tie-in novel fill in his childhood in the asylum.

11 Interesting Facts About Hitman: Codename 47

Interesting Facts (5)

  1. #001

    Agent 47 ended up bald, with a barcode on the back of his head, by accident. The team had trouble building hair for the character model, so they removed it, then added the barcode to give him a more distinctive look.

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  2. #002

    The 12 digits of Agent 47's barcode encode his birth date and clone status: "640509" stands for September 5, 1964, while "040147" means fourth series, first in his series, 47th clone.

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  3. #003

    As a boy in the asylum, Agent 47 kept a rabbit intended for experiments that had escaped the lab; a couple of years later he accidentally broke its neck and cried.

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  4. #004

    The option to save mid-level was removed after test players finished the game in under 4 hours.

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  5. #005

    Agent 47's face is largely modeled on David Bateson, the South African voice actor who also voices the character.

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Production Story (2)

  1. #006

    Character designer Jacob Anderson said Agent 47's signature look was not planned from the start; early concepts included an older, hairy man and a character wearing "weird hi-tech glasses."

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  2. #007

    The mission "The Lee Hong Assassination" seems to draw on the restaurant scene in The Godfather (1972), in which Michael Corleone kills Virgil "The Turk" Sollozzo and the corrupt police captain Mark McCluskey. Both take place in a restaurant run by a powerful crime boss, Italian in the film and Chinese in Hitman, and in both the protagonist has to kill a prominent gangster in a public place without drawing suspicion. The character can also wait in the bathroom before carrying out the plan. In Hitman only the gangster Lee Hong is a required target, but the player may also kill the corrupt police chief without blocking progress through the story, which mirrors the film scene further. It is not a direct adaptation, yet the mission's structure and mechanics point clearly to that famous sequence.

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Characters & Cast (2)

  1. #008

    If the player talks to the receptionist while disguised as a fat guard, 47 snaps at the NPC: "Go sort some mail then you macho pig". The line is not delivered in David Bateson's familiar voice and does not match 47's character. It was probably written during development, then cut but left in the game for reasons that remain unclear.

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  2. #009

    Bateson criticized the casting of Timothy Olyphant in the 2007 film, mainly because Olyphant looked too young for the part when he first shaved his head, though he conceded that Olyphant did a decent job.

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Easter Eggs & References (1)

  1. #010

    A removed one-liner spoken by 47 says "I feel like a Death Star", very likely a nod to the Star Wars franchise.

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Deeper Meaning (1)

  1. #011

    The novel hints that 47 was mischievous as a child, firing a makeshift slingshot at guards and asylum staff and sometimes shooting smiley faces into targets during weapons training.

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