HITMAN 3 interview with Executive Producer, Forest Swartout Large
Podcast: Spawn On Me with Kahlief Adams
Date: January 22, 2021 • 62 min
Really good interview with Forest Swartout Large, the senior producer of Hitman 3 at IO Interactive. She is super funny and articulate.
Forest is a highly successful producer in the video game industry over the past twenty years. It is also notable that Forest is a visible minority and female producer in the video game industry. She is a role model for future younger females with aspirations to work in the video game industry.
Started at UC Berkeley in film studies, and then left to start at age 19 to work at an animation film company (Tippett Studio),working her way up from coffee hand to producer. Forest worked on the first photo-real fur rendering. Was producer and senior manager at Crystal Dynamics, where she worked on five titles in the Tomb Raider franchise, as well as LIMBO (iOS) and Inside and the first Unity title on Xbox One.
Forest discusses how she works to establish and develop effective, inclusive and resilient teams, harnessing the creative talent within teams, and bringing together people of different backgrounds that merge together to create a common vision – which were key aspects to the success of Hitman 3.
Really good producers are hard to come by. You can tell from game development hell, such as Bioware’s Anthem, what happens when you don’t have a good management team.
Forest started at IOI working with Game Director for Hitman 3, Mattias Engström on Marrakesh of Hitman2016, when the team needed an injection of new energy to push out the last half of the content of Hitman2016.
Forest says that Hokkaido was conceived to have more glory kills which were never released. I would like to see those X-rated, never-to-be released glory kills.
Stated that Hitman VR was conceived for Hitman from the beginning, not as an afterthought – pushed mainly by two VR diehards on the IOI team.
Forest said that quite a large team is still involved in the post-release of Hitman 3 content over the next year, but that there would be no new Hitman maps, just elusive contracts, escalation contracts and possible reworking of existing maps.
Forest stated that being independent in 2017, meant that IOI could generate Hitman trailers for Hitman 3, where they could introduce Hitman 3 as more as a cerebral puzzle sandbox with stronger narrative ties, and less as a fast action “shooty-shooty” game which was pushed by their previous owners to increase sales of Hitman2016.
Forest said that IOI employees worked on Hitman 3 as if it would be the last of Hitman for IO interactive for awhile. IO interactive put their heart and soul in producing the best, refined Hitman in their third iteration of the soft reboot, knowing it would be the last Hitman release for awhile.
Almost all interviews with IOI management discuss how they have tried to meet expectations of their core fans.
In the last of the trilogy, Hitman 3, IOI realized post-release that they appeared to have met expectations of non-core, Hitman players too, who finally understood what Hitman was about.
Certainly Hitman 3 ended up with most gamers and the developer (IOI) having their expectations met. This wasn’t true of Hitman 2016 where Hitman2016 didn’t meet expectations of gamers, where controversies such as the episodic release and the always online requirement overshadowed other aspects of the game.
