Hitman: Absolution cocktails from Loading, featuring Absolut Vodka 

Ingredients:
1 part Silver Tequila
1 part Gin
1 part White Rum
1 part Triple Sec
Lemon Lime soda
Fresh Lime Juice

plus 1 choice of
Head Shot: 1 part Absolut 100 Proof Vodka
Cut Down: 1 part Absolut Citron Vodka
Drowned: 1 part Absolut Peach Vodka
Bured: Absolut Peppar

Directions: Choose your “death” ingredient. Mix all alcoholic ingredients into a mixing glass with ice and stir. Pour the mixture into a highball glass over ice. Top with the lemon lime soda and fresh lime juice. Drink up and watch your back.

Loading created these drinks for the release of Square-Enix’s game Hitman Absolution. 

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.

Drinks created by James Dance of Loading. Photography by Will Edgecombe.