How would you approach writing Hitman as a novel?

[LuoirM]

Hitman is a well-renowned video game series, what sets it apart is its mechanic of ten thousands different ways to kill a target, the events, schedule and trigger of targets, as well as the main character ability to blend in, blah blah blah blah blah blah YOU KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT

I was watching The Falcon And The Winter Soldier episode 3 and I noticed a gate at around 40 minutes mark that reminds me of that one mission in Hitman 2016 that I played and now I'm curious.

How would you approach writing Hitman as a novel?.

The main questions and problems I arose:
- If you were to describe literally every room and point out every possible exit, potential weapon, disguises that'd be a lot of info dumping and a whole Chekhov armory. But the readers gonna feel like you didn't choose the assault rifle and instead settling for a Glock 19.
- If you were to make up as you go, like. "John walked into the room, there was a man across the hallway, so he grabbed a wrench and threw it." then it's just not the spirit of Hitman

I'm only thinking this at a surface level, do tell me what you think!

 

[CharlesEBrown]

IIRC Hitman was one of the last Vertigo titles DC initiated before ending the imprint, so it kind of started as a novel before becoming a video game and a movie.
To capture the feel of the video game, the best way to do it would be to write it out as kind of a "Choose Your Own Adventure" thing - create a dedicated website, and let the reader choose which option the story follows - describe the room in general terms, create a hot link on every likely option, have a "mouseover" that lists a positive and negative possibility for each choice, and each choice is a link leading to a different branch of the story (most, as with all CYOA stories, eventually lead back to one of three or four paths through, generally two with a positive and two or three with a negative outcome).
To capture the feel of the series or movie, well, go read or watch them and see how it was done there.

 

[Zinless]

I feel like Hitman as a novel would work a lot more from the perspective of the targets. Introduce the target, why they're a bad person, introduce the venue/area, then... starts making things go wrong.

Imagine Final Destination, but death is present physically.

 

[hidayo]

I would like it presented in multiple POV from the would-be victims. Their daily lives, inner thought, and then BAM.

 

[Ai-chan]

Ai-chan would ideally do as Agatha Christie would do. Describe the room in detail. Let the readers assume what would be most likely usable. Once the scene is set, the action follows. There may be additional details provided as the chapter continues but that is dependent on what the hitman would naturally notice as he moves and things shift.

Describing the scene is not an infodump, it's setting the scene. Infodump is when you drop unnecessary details that would only matter much later. Infodump is where the details are so unnecessary that your readers would get a headache in the mildest form and spit blood from excessive ones.

For example, this is setting the scene:

螢燈籠 tiptoed into the room. Her eyes first fell on the desk on the other side of the room, the illumination of the moon from the open window showed her stack of papers that he assumed were documents regarding 大天火's plans. On the same desk were pens and various stationery common to such desks, except for the single sheathed blade partially hidden under a thin folder.

螢燈籠 glanced at a bookcase on the left wall, holding books both common and rare. She noticed one particular book, titled "How To Be A Cool Dude", and felt slight interest, but it didn't hold her attention for long. After all, such books would be common on Amazon.

Stepping inside gently without as much as the sound of cloth rubbing another, she closed the door behind her. A gentle click hid all evidence of her entry. A small table stood right beside the door, which she carefully avoided touching. The small table looked stable... and expensive... she would love to bring it home. The real problem would be the large vase on top of it, It wasn't particularly big, but vases had a strange quirk of falling when they're least convenient.

On the right wall was a large tapestry, eastern, she assumed, though she wasn't a connoisseur of tapestries, so she couldn't say exactly where it came from. From her experience, such tapestries often hid secrets... and hidden rooms. Such tapestries could also be hiding traps and hidden cameras. Yet examining it would also carry risks of its own.

This is infodump.

The assassin,whose name was once Thal’Zorion Drexxion Vuntheer, Son of the Moonless Chasm, Third of His Vein, Unremembered by Time and Forsaken by Twelve Pantheons, although he now simply went by “Knife”,entered the room at exactly 7:01:42.009 PST, a time he chose not because it was optimal, but because numerologically it resonated with the ancient harmonic frequencies encoded into the crystalline death chants of the extinct Hroggari bone-choirs, who were said to have sung time itself into despair.

The room, if one could even call such a metaphysically fraught intersection of architecture, existential rot, and metaphoric decay a "room", was once the breakfast nook of a minor bureaucrat who, in the 3rd Interregnum of the Burned Archive, had rewritten the Municipal Trash Codes of Sector 5J in such a way that every subsequent waste bin produced by the Ministry of Refuse contained a latent curse, manifesting only in the dreams of those born during eclipses. That bureaucrat later choked to death on a fermented yam.

Knife’s boots, which were lined with the recycled thoughts of dead poets, glided silently across the obsidian floor tiles, each one etched with the micro-screams of forgotten civilizations ground into powder beneath the wheels of empires long vanished into the bowel-slick void of history. His cloak,spun from the whispers of orphans abandoned in quantum rifts,fluttered ever so slightly despite the complete absence of air movement, because tragedy moves on its own.

As he approached the target’s door (which was carved from the final tree that grew on a planet no longer believed to exist), he paused, not out of caution, but to mourn the concept of surprise, which had died the day his innocence was consumed by the ever-hungering God of Contextless Flashbacks.

And then he breathed.

 

[LuoirM]

Ai-chan would ideally do as Agatha Christie would do. Describe the room in detail. Let the readers assume what would be most likely usable. Once the scene is set, the action follows. There may be additional details provided as the chapter continues but that is dependent on what the hitman would naturally notice as he moves and things shift.

Describing the scene is not an infodump, it's setting the scene. Infodump is when you drop unnecessary details that would only matter much later. Infodump is where the details are so unnecessary that your readers would get a headache in the mildest form and spit blood from excessive ones.

For example, this is setting the scene:



This is infodump.

So... A detective novel, but from the killer's POV

 

[Tsuru]

I would like it presented in multiple POV from the would-be victims. Their daily lives, inner thought, and then BAM.

That and/or writing like a bonus chapter. Both works xD


Kudo too of the possibility of the famous "window phoneguy NPC" that learn he didnt have cancer. But MC (transmigrator) doesnt kill him (bc its one of his fav NPC like any fan), and the guy(POV) somehow keep hiring weird noises, muffled sounds, but bc he so happy he basically dont hear them, and at the end of the day he is fired with everyone, bc the leader is dead.
tldr : A milder version of MeetThePyro (TF2)