Hitman: Sniper — My Story
On December 16th 2015, I won the Hitman: Sniper 15th Anniversary Tournament. This is the tale of how that came to be. Hope you enjoy the read.
My background on Hitman: Sniper
I started playing Hitman: Sniper a while ago. Can’t remember the exact date, but it was shortly after the global launch, sometime mid-2015. I was following news about the game since its soft-launch in Canada, as I’ve always wanted a good sniper game for my iPhone (and there wasn’t one) so, as soon as it was available, I grabbed it.
Started playing like everyone else (completing missions, purchasing and upgrading new guns, etc), but never actually got to try and climb up the leaderboards. Shortly after, and for personal reasons (let’s just say I needed to free up my time), I chose to avoid and delete all games from my iPhone (and there were a few at the time).
How I’ve found out about the tournament
In late November, in a moment of boredom, I wanted a game to spend the time, and Hitman: Sniper was the first name to come to mind. Reinstalled it, started doing some missing missions, and then decided to check what Everyplay was all about. Created an account, joined the Hitman: Sniper community, and came across a post announcing the tournament. Followed the link to the official Hitman: Sniper page to read the rules and check the prizes.
In hindsight, it would be easy looking at the first prize and thinking “I want that!” (which I did, as I’ve been wanting an iPad for a long time, and could never afford one), but at the time I was nowhere near the level of some of the scores I was seeing in Everyplay (not to mention my pathetic leaderboard position), and just thought it would be cool if I was among the top 10 players in the final standings. I went for it, with the main goal being having fun in the process, while keeping an eye for 2nd or 3rd place (that hoodie looked great).
What the tournament was all about
The tournament would take place for the duration of three weeks. In each week, a challenge would be given to all contestants, with players having to upload the replays of their runs to the Everyplay Hitman: Sniper page. In each round, points would be given to players, based in their performance and round standings, with double the points for round 3.
My device
The tournament was open to all Hitman: Sniper players, whether they had Android or iOS devices. The only device I had was my “old” and trustworthy iPhone 5s. I thought I was going to be in a disadvantage to all the other players using tablets and big screen phones, but at the end, and the way I see it, that worked to my advantage (more on that later on).
Round 1 — The Cleaner (Nov 26th — Dec 2nd)
For Round 1, players would have to upload their best scores, using the Jackal, and disposing of all the bodies, which meant that, at the end of the run, the number of kills had to be equal to number of disposals.
Before submitting a score, I started watching other players’ submissions, to get a feel for the different strategies, and try to adapt them to my style of play, and improve on them. Here, however, I made my (first) mistake: I thought that only kills/disposals would count, and didn’t pay any attention to a high score. When I’ve spotted my misjudging of the rules, there were only a few hours left to the end of the round, and I didn’t have the necessary time left to adjust my play style.
Nevertheless, I was surprised to have ended it in 2nd place, 1M points behind HumblingCandy566, who overtook me just four hours prior to the end of the round. It was only then that I started believing that getting the tournament win was a real possibility, and that I should push hard and fight for it.
Round 2 — The Russian Hare (Dec 3rd — Dec 9th)
Bent on not repeating the mistake from Round 1, I read the rules carefully, this time. As such, I aimed for a high score this time, and not just the validation score. For Round 2, the weapon of choice was the Furia, and all kills had to be exclusively achieved by headshots.
This is where things started to get weird. Shortly after the start of stage 2, I started getting some strange bugs in the Everyplay app, and shortly after, I’ve found out that my Everyplay account had disappeared, for no apparent reasons. I panicked, and before I even got a reply from my support request to Everyplay, I created a new account, with the exact username. Unfortunately, that rush in solving things made it impossible to recover my old account and previously uploaded videos. Luckily for me, my score for stage 1 had already been validated, and only lost a couple of days in stage 2.
Having put my mind to ease, I’ve put my focus to the task at hand. Competition was fierce, and Captain 4pollo took the lead very early in the stage. With a few hours to go until the end of the stage, I was forced to give up, as I was becoming more and more frustrated, and accumulating a series of mistakes and bad runs, so I’ve decided to get a good night sleep (the stages ended at 4AM in my local time), leave my fate to chance, and focus on stage 3 of the competition. When I woke up, the first thing I checked was my standing, and was glad to find I managed to come in second in the stage, with a mere 800K points difference to Captain 4pollo, and 1.4M in front of HumblingCandy566, who came in third.
I dropped to third in the aggregate standings, but was still in the race, with just 16 points separating me from Captain 4pollo and HumblingCandy566, who were tied for first place.
This was my final submission for Round 2.
Round 3 — The Ultimate Challenge (Dec 10th — Dec 16th)
In the final round, any weapon was permitted, and the only limitation was time. The goal was to get the highest score, in under 2 minutes, excluding extraction. What this meant, was that the main target (in my case, Markus Krug) had to be terminated in under 2 minutes (in-game time), to be validated in the final tally screen. My weapon of choice for this round (well, everyone’s choice, obviously) was the Adagio.
In this round, I had a strategy: to hold my cards until the end, in order not to reveal my game plan. I would still play, practice, find out what my top score would be, but not submit a replay. However, after a day or two, Captain 4pollo was already raising the stakes, and afraid that I wouldn’t manage to repeat my best runs, I was forced to submit a score. In the following days, Captain 4pollo and I were playing a game of cat and mouse. He would best my score, I would return the favor, and so forth. By Sunday, December 13th, I was leading with a score of 16.6M, a mere o.7M over Captain 4pollo’s score of 15.9M. At this time, our other competitor for 1st place, HumblingCandy566, hadn’t submit a score yet, so I was feeling the pressure from both 4pollo’s proximity, and HumblingCandy’s absence, as I was sure he was holding out on a big score, that would submit close to the end date. I had to up my game!
That day, I went to a friend’s place, to try Hitman: Sniper on his iPad Air. Perhaps a bigger screen would give me the extra boost I needed? It did not. I would have to rethink and train myself on playing on a tablet, as I wouldn’t be able to grab it with both hands, as I was doing on my 4" iPhone 5s. “Well, let’s try your iPhone 6s Plus. I can still hold a grip with both hands, contrary to the iPad Air, and still have a bigger screen than my 5s”. Guess what? That didn’t work either… The way I grip the iPhone while playing, didn’t allow me reaching the center of the screen with my thumbs. I play with “tap-to-shoot”, never got used to playing with a shoot button, but couldn’t do it on the bigger 5.5" iPhone. Time to get back to my trustworthy 5s, and look for alternative ways of improving my score.
We decided to stream my iPhone to his TV, so he could watch me play, and work as my wingman. That, I quickly found out that, wasn’t going to do it, either. The levels of concentration I needed to pull a perfect run weren’t compatible with having someone by my side talking. So we just eased up, and I played a couple times, to try and get the best score I could. I pulled a score close to my best, and then we both took a really good look at the score statistics, with a calculator by our side, trying to make sense of the points system, bonus, averages by kill type, etc. We quickly came to the conclusion that the place where I was losing points (or rather, not winning them) was in the number of ‘No hold breath’ kills. There are also bonus for ‘Minimum zoom’ shots, but those weren’t as high as ‘No hold breath’, so I’ve decided that if I had to use only one type of help on certain difficult shots, I would only zoom in, and not hold breath, unless absolutely necessary. I went home, “promising” my friend that by next day, I would get my (by then) current goal of 17M.
The following day, I tried putting in practice what I had learned the on Sunday, but my score wasn’t improving, by much. During the entirety of the afternoon, I pushed hard, but to no avail. I had ran out the routine I had at the moment, and would have to look for new ways of improving my score. The next hours were spent just analyzing guard and target paths, trying new shots, and a new order in which to kill my targets, with a special focus on new ways to pull some extra double headshots. In my head, double headshots were crucial for a higher score (and I turn out to be right). It was then, almost in a stroke of luck, that I’ve discovered a way to pull a double headshot in the billiard room, and got a score of 17.3M, in a new routine that I then refined, slightly raising it to 17.4M. In my mind, I already had the perfect routine, in which I was pulling a series of 5 double headshots. All that was left was to improve on this routine, trying to introduce small variations or refining some shots.
After breaking the 17M barrier, I smashed the 18 and 19M. When I did it, my friends were pushing me into getting 20M. That would be a pretty nice “round” number in which to finish my participation in the tournament. In the last couple days of the tournament, I was practically playing from dusk till dawn, and in the last day, I didn’t even go to bed.
I played till the last minute (once again, 4AM in my local time), trying to get the desired 20M. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to get that score, and actually felt like I had left my friends down, although my final entry came close to my objective, at 19.7M.
That “sorrow” was short lived, though. A few minutes after the end time, I browsed all recent Everyplay videos, and didn’t seem to be anyone who had beaten me. I was thrilled, but since I never considered myself a lucky person, I thought it would be better to wait for the final and official results.
You can watch my final submission of 19.7M here.
And so, in the following day, and after a sleepless night, I had my early Christmas gift:
I had won the Hitman: Sniper 15th Anniversary Tournament! After three exhausting (but extremely fun) weeks, I finally had the reward for all my hard work. I was in heaven!
What came next
That day I had a well-deserved good night of sleep. The following days, and despite no longer needing to improve my 2 minute routine, I decided that I should keep trying to break the 20M barrier, which I did, a few days later, with a 20.5M run.
It was then that a friend of mine, Nuno, challenged me to go after the highest score ever recorded on video: HerryCollar463's 29M run. I thought it would be impossible, as this player was showing mad skills at the game, and I didn’t have any experience in what I call marathon runs (playing the whole 10 minutes of the mission).
If there’s anything I should have learned from my tournament experience, however, is that whenever I find something impossible, and doubt myself, I always manage to surprise me, and so I did it once again. Started slowly crawling the leaderboards, a million here, a million there, until I finally beat the world record, also being the first to break the 30M barrier in the process (in fact, it was close to 31M).
Of course that I didn’t stop there, and kept wanting more and more, and as the moment I write these words, my current high score sits at 36.8M.
I’ve also been sharing my knowledge and passion with the game with other players. I’ve created a YouTube channel, where I post high score runs, tips, weapon showcases, how-to’s, and all other things Hitman: Sniper related. Most recently, I’ve uploaded a video on EveryPlay and YouTube, showing one of the possible tactics players could use to reach the necessary score to get the Adagio (as it’s reserved for the top 1000 players in the leaderboards), and was happy to see that at least one person managed to do it, thanks to my help. Hopefully more will follow.
What’s to come
My current and immediate goal is to reach 37M points, which I’m sure I will (hopefully sooner than later). Then, time to lay back, and wait for the much-anticipated Death Valley update, where everyone will start from scratch, and competition start anew. On a personal point a view, I’ll also be looking forward to try the new rifle that will be named after me (as part of the tournament prizes). I’m extremely curious and anxious to see it and try it out, but I have faith in the team behind it.
Special Thanks
Nuno, Pedro and Matthew, for supporting me in this “quest”.
Captain 4pollo and HumblingCandy566, for the great competition. I wouldn’t have pulled such high scores, if it wasn’t for their high skill in the game. I learned much from them!
Nick, for being so kind and helpful (and patient!) with all my questions, and doing a great job for the community.
Genevieve, for being so enthusiastic about me playing on an iPhone 5s.
HerryCollar463, for having risen the stakes so high in the game, and for sharing his awesome skills. If there’s anyone that was my inspiration in my high score runs, it’s him.
Last but not least, a big thank you to everyone Square-Enix Montréal, for giving me some of the best games ever to grace my iPhone (and now, iPad). Despite this being a story about Hitman: Sniper, I can’t let pass the occasion to express my love for the GO series (Lara Croft and Hitman). Please keep it up, guys and gals.
