Hello! I'm James from Loading Bar - a gaming café/bar based in Falmouth in the South West of England, which offers people a place to drink, relax and play. 

But as well as serving up coffee and cocktails to the locals, we also create tie-in drinks for game launches and provide themed cocktails for other events and publications. You may have seen some of our previous exploits, bouncing around the internet - for example - our Minecraft landscape shot set or our slightly more extravagant 2100 shot glass tribute we presented to Hideo Kojima for Metal Gear Solid’s 25th anniversary. 

The cafe/bar opened in March 2010 and we had created a bespoke menu of badly punned, but exquisite tasting game, themed drinks by Christmas that year. After releasing the menu on the internet Capcom contacted us about using their games for inspiration. We created our first 'official' drink for them, and things blew up from there. We used our new found confidence to start approaching more studios and publishers, including a Deus Ex: Human Revolution themed drink for Square Enix. So When Hitman: Absolution was announced we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to work with the Square Enix again! 

How do we go about creating a drink, then?

Regardless of the game we like to really do our research and re-create core aspects from the gameplay or storyline, often deciding on what we want to represent rather than how on earth we are going to do it.

With a franchise as iconic as Hitman we had plenty to work with and decided we wanted to capture the variety of kill styles and create a set of drinks that took on both the visual style and classic themes of the Hitman series... but first we needed a 'victim'.

In this case, the victim is a rather delicious Tokyo Ice Tea, a blend of five spirits; Tequila, Gin, Rum, Triple Sec (traditionally you'd have Kiwi but Triple Sec or Cointreau is easier to source) and Absolut vodka (almost a pun) - which represents the fifth instalment in the series of course. The drink is then 'finished off' with lemonade and fresh lime.

So having settled on the unlucky target, we went to our long-suffering photographer Will (check out his blog here) and explained the multiple ways in which we would like to assassinate our beverage. After recovering from this initial confusion about the idea, he took to the idea with aplomb and we found four potential methods of execution.

The studio was an interesting place to be that day, with glasses of booze meeting air rifles and samurai swords... it was messy - but an awful lot of fun. Seven glasses lost their lives that day for a total of four final images, which although a fairly good ratio, clearly wouldn't be seen as acceptable by a certain bar -oded agent...

To really draw attention to the (borderline offensively) bad ‘Abosolut’ semi-pun, we used different flavours of the Swedish spirit for each image.

For the flaming assassination we used Absolut Peppar for added heat, citron for the cut down version, extra proof Absolut 100 for the headshot and a refreshing peach vodka for the underwater hit. Can drinks drown? We think so.

Please drink responsibly. Visit for www.drinkaware.co.uk the facts about drinking alcohol.