IO Interactive was founded in Copenhagen in September 1998 as a joint venture between Nordisk Film and Reto-Moto, a small group of Danish developers who wanted to build their own engine and their own games. The result was Glacier, and the first game to run on it was Hitman: Codename 47 in 2000, published by Eidos Interactive. It introduced Agent 47 and the series' defining idea, that a contract is a puzzle with many solutions, and the studio spent the next decade refining it through Hitman 2: Silent Assassin, Hitman: Contracts and Hitman: Blood Money, while branching out with the squad-based Freedom Fighters in 2003, the crime thriller Kane & Lynch: Dead Men in 2007 and its sequel Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, and the family-friendly Mini Ninjas in 2009. Eidos acquired the studio outright in 2004, and when Square Enix bought Eidos in 2009 IO Interactive became part of the Japanese publisher's European operation, where it built the Glacier 2 engine and shipped Hitman: Absolution in 2012 and the episodic HITMAN in 2016.
Square Enix put the studio up for sale in 2017, and a management buyout led by CEO Hakan Abrak turned IO Interactive into an independent company that kept the rights to Hitman. Independence paid off: HITMAN 2 arrived in 2018, the self-published HITMAN 3 in 2021 gave the studio the biggest launch in the series' history, and in 2023 the trilogy was unified as HITMAN World of Assassination with the roguelike Freelancer mode. The company has since grown from a single Copenhagen office into studios in Malmö, Barcelona, Istanbul and Brighton, and is now developing its first James Bond game, 007 First Light, alongside an original fantasy project. For players, the IO Interactive catalogue means stealth sandboxes with unmatched depth, a reputation for supporting its games for years after launch, and a house style that treats a clean, unseen kill as the highest form of craft.
