Back when Hitman: Absolution came out, people (rightfully) got angry over some of the strange marketing decisions made. Most notable, was the reveal of The Saints, assassins in bondage suits who disguised themselves as nuns.

But as I’ve noted several times in this LP, a lot of that can be traced to Blood Money. In the birthday party mission, we saw both the guard who sniffed the used panties in the daughter’s room and the wife who slept with both the clown and the poolboy. The Christmas party played host to the senator’s son who routinely beat on the woman who sat next to him, and the female assassin sent to seduce 47. Here in Vegas, we bear witness to the strange behavior of some random man’s wife. And later, we’ll see another scantily clad female assassin attempt to kill our anti-hero/villain-protagonist.

To bring into focus all of progress we have made over the years, all of this was acceptable in 2006. Back when Blood Money came out, nobody really reacted to any of this stuff. This was just how games were. Absolution came out in 2012, only a few short years later, and got justifiably shit-panned for using a lot of this same imagery. It also had a laughable grindhouse style to go with it. As gamers, we came together and said that we expect more from modern games.

Fast forward to the modern era, and the new Hitman game eschews most of that questionable design decisions in favor of something more akin to the “International Man of Mystery” we see in both Codename 47 and Silent Assassin.

It’s only been ten years, but we’ve come a long way since then. It’s interesting to play games, because that’s where one can really see it.