IO Interactive marries Hitman with 007 and MindsEye

IO Interactive unveiled the 007: First Light and MindsEye games at the Summer Game Fest show today. But on top of that, it announced integrations with IO Interactive’s Hitman: World of Assassination.

Hakan Abrak, CEO of IO Interactive, took the stage at the show to reveal the news along with host Geoff Keighley and actor Mads Mikkelsen, the actor who plays LeChiffre, the villain in the Casino Royale movie.

You’ll be able to go after LeChiffre in the World of Assassination, as he will be an elusive target in the Hitman game. And Agent 47 is expected to appear in MindsEye, the debut game appearing shortly from Build A Rocket Boy, a development studio headed by Leslie Benzies of Grand Theft Auto fame.

At an evening event in Hollywood, IO Interactive also announced that Hitman will come to PSVR 2 as well as in tabletop form, with a Kickstarter campaign coming. There’s a playable Switch 2 version.

The 007 game will focus on the beginning of his journey, starting with his parents dying in a fall from a mountain. Bond gets recruited to a spy agency and goes through training. Then he engages in missions with a lot of violence — until he becomes an asset for MI6. As he’s hanging upside down above a pit of alligators, he quips, “I suppose this is a teachable moment.” It’s that classic Bond humor in an action-adventure, not so different from Tomb Raider or Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

The company’s partners on the Bond game include Aston Martin, Coca-Cola, Orlebar Brown, Herman Miller Gaming, GeForce RTX, Omega, Jaguar, Range Rober and Defender. Gameplay will be shown off this summer. The game launches in 2026.

IO Interactive’s games run on the Glacier game engine, which has been around for 25 years. It scales from mobile to consoles and PC, allowing the teams that can move fast with high levels of quarterly.

Adam Whiting of Build A Rocket Boy showed off some action in a mission for MindsEye. The hero, Jacob Diaz, is pinned down on a stairwell atop a skyscraper. He moves from cover to cover and takes out enemies with the help of a drone. There is no single way to approach combat, as there are a lot of variety to the options. You can scan the environment with the drone to find enemies. The drone can hack doors and disrupt enemies. Players transition into cinematic moments throughout the game.

Jacob gets into a drone and then gets shot out of sky and he survives the crash on the ground. Then he fights military robots on the ground. Jacob carries a wide array of weapons, and the enemies don’t seem to stand a chance against him. The devs have built an entire city with many ways to get to an objective.

The devs also showed off racing cars on a track on an airfield where jets are taking off. You can preorder the game now.

Mads Mikkelson, the actor who played LeChiffre, the villain in Casino Royale, was at the Hollywood event. Mikkelson said it was strange to do voice acting for games where he had to talk about so many different options for dialogue. David Bateson, who looks like Agent 47 and plays the voice of this killing machine, treats him as a Frankenstein’s Monster who is looking deep inside for some kind of humanity.

“I think of how it might be to kill, and I think about his backstory of where he comes from,” Bateson said.