Hm, my line of thinking for who might be the new “celebrity” is a little different from what I’m seeing from everyone else. Sean Bean is a big celebrity that they brought in to pretty much launch Hitman 2, but the surprise ET that the Drop turned out to be was for someone I don’t think many of us had heard of.
I remember hearing that Dimitri Vegas had done some voice work for other games like DLC characters for Mortal Kombat which made me think that he just probably had an agent that was trying to bridge him into video games.
I figured that if I could figure out who his talent agency was, I could maybe see if there were any MMA fighters that had also done voice work and that would be our best guess. Turns out Dimitri Vegas’s talent agency is his ACTUAL talent agency. As in, he owns a talent agency called Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike or also named the “THE SMASH UNIVERSE AGENCY” as it’s called on a few websites.
One website I found is Dimitri Vegas / The Smash Universe Agency Launch
The two-time voted #1 DJ’s in the world, Dimitri Vegas and Like Mike are adding “entrepreneurs” to their repertoire by opening up a music, gaming, and lifestyle agency named The Smash Universe.
The company will focus on content creators, gamers, and lifestyle influencers providing management, creative services, and PR/marketing concepts, in addition to developing both real-life and digital events.
I can’t find an actual website because all searches for THE SMASH UNIVERSE brings up results for fucking Smash Bros. Universe (insert joke about the new ET being star fox here) and the website that other articles link to seems to be a vacant domain.
Another article I found at https://edm.com/industry/dimitri-vegas-like-mike-gaming-agency-the-smash-universe
starts with
Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike have teamed up with video game industry mainstay Miranda Huybers for their new gaming, music, and lifestyle agency, The Smash Universe . The organization will provide management assistance to content creators and gamers in addition to developing both real-life and digital events. They also will partner with global brands and use their platform to expand online and offline exposure to help their partners’ marketing and public relations efforts.
so before I go any further down this rabbit hole, I’m just going to say that I’m guessing the reason we got the Drop as a Celeb ET was because this DJ dude is starting his own talent agency and looking to make some projects happen. I’m sure some small deal with IOI was reached, possibly with IO getting paid to make it to give some more celebrity to Vegas and not the other way around, and I’m then guessing this next ET with be in a similar vein. I liked the drop, and I’m not trying to trash the guy, but I don’t think IO benefited from having a random DJ be a character in their game. On the other hand he would benefit from growing his profile in the medium as well as having something he could show potential clients looking for an agency.
If we find an MMA fighter tied to his agency, that would be our best bet, but it could be a rando youtuber or influencer who’s ingame character is a fighter. youtuber celebrity boxing has been a popular thing for whatever reason the past few years.
That’s my best guess at least. I’m not sure my interest goes beyond the 15 minutes it took to look up, so it’s not a lot, but is kind of interesting. As funny as the idea that hitman lives on via ecelebrity vanity projects, I am happy with anything we get at this stage of the game. New Et that unlock the person’s suit is more than I thought we’d be getting this many years after H3 launched.