Hotline Miami asks its question out loud. Between missions, men in animal masks, meeting in a dingy room, ask the player’s character, a silent hitman whom fans call Jacket, “Do you like hurting other people?” The missions themselves are short, bright and extremely violent: a phone call sends you to an address in a neon-lit 1980s Miami, seen from above, and a building full of armed men. Edge asked the two developers the same question. “No,” they replied together. “But we do like violent games,” said Dennis Wedin. “That is the main question for the game: do you like violence? Do you like violent games? Why do you like violent games?”
The game was made by two people in nine months in Wedin’s flat in Sweden, with no budget, and it became the breakthrough for its publisher, Devolver Digital.
Fast facts
- Developer: Dennaton Games: Jonatan Söderström (“Cactus”), programmer, and Dennis Wedin, artist.
- Publisher: Devolver Digital.
- Released: 23 October 2012, for Windows PCs; later for Mac, Linux, PlayStation 3 and Vita (June 2013), PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and Xbox One.
- Made with: GameMaker, YoYo Games’ development kit.
- Music: licensed electronic tracks from artists including M.O.O.N., Scattle and Perturbator.
- Sequel: Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number (2015).
Two Swedes and an old prototype
Söderström had been releasing free games since 2004, more than 40 of them by 2012, Edge reported, many of them strange and experimental. One that he never finished was Super Carnage, a top-down shooter he started in 2004 at the age of 18, in which the only aim was to kill as many people as possible. He shelved it after struggling with the enemies’ pathfinding.
He met Wedin, a singer and keyboard player in a metalcore band, and they made a promotional game for the band together. Running out of money, they decided their next game would be their first commercial one. Looking through Söderström’s unfinished prototypes, Wedin found Super Carnage “and instantly saw its potential”. Before starting, they watched films for inspiration, among them Kick-Ass, the Miami drugs documentary Cocaine Cowboys and, above all, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, a thriller that made them ask whether a game could also make the player think about the killing in it. Edge also saw Miami Vice, To Live and Die in LA and the tilting camera angles of Brian De Palma in the result.
Söderström built it in GameMaker, as he had all his games: “There are very few tools that allow you to make games as fast. It’s very easy to use and you can code pretty sloppily in it.” The cost came later, when the old version of GameMaker they had used turned out not to suit newer operating systems. Wedin remembered the nine months as exhausting: “Some days we were so tired, and we didn’t know if we were going to earn anything from this game or if anyone was even going to play it.”
Rooms as puzzles
One hit kills the player, and one hit kills most enemies. Each mission starts unarmed, with only a choice of animal mask, and the player has to take weapons from the people in the building: a baseball bat, a knife, a shotgun. A loading-screen tip, Edge noted, set out the philosophy: “Don’t be afraid of dying.” Death sends the player straight back to the start of the floor, and enemies’ weapons are shuffled each time, so a memorised route does not always work.
Players complained that the enemies were stupid, because they did not always come running at the sound of gunfire. Wedin said that was deliberate. “The game is mainly a puzzle game. It’s not a Metal Gear sneaking game. If enemies reacted to the gunshots and bodies, they would destroy the puzzles in the room.” Each room was designed with a few ways in, and the tension came from the pauses outside each door, planning the order of attack.
The masks were meant to mean something too. “The main character uses the masks to disconnect himself from guilt,” Wedin explained. “As we all know, animals can’t be held guilty for their own actions.” At the end of each mission the player has to walk back out through the building to the car, past every body.
The pair were not worried about controversy, Wedin said, “because it’s pixel art. If we’d made it in 3D and very realistic then it might have been different.” When the game was rated at the Gamescom show in Germany, he recalled, “they gave it a 12, I think, because the graphics are so colourful.”
Release and success
The team at Vlambeer, makers of Super Crate Box, sent a copy to Devolver Digital, which took the game to the first Rezzed show in Brighton in 2012, where it won Game of the Show. It came out on Steam on 23 October 2012. By the end of February 2013 it had sold just over 300,000 copies on the PC, Edge reported, despite heavy piracy. Söderström, who did not own a current console, was unchanged by it: “I’m used to eating cheap noodles and fish sticks. And that hasn’t really changed yet.”
A separate team ported the game to the PlayStation 3 and Vita, released in June 2013. Retro Gamer reviewed the Vita version at £6.49 and gave it 87 per cent: “It’s sick, it’s violent, but we can’t stop playing it.”
Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number began as an expansion and grew into a full sequel as Söderström and Wedin added missions; it came out in March 2015.
Sources
- Edge issue 245, October 2012, pp. 54–57: preview (Dennaton Games; Söderström and Wedin; the masks; one-hit deaths and random weapons; “Don’t be afraid of dying”; Drive, Miami Vice, To Live and Die in LA, De Palma).
- Edge issue 252, April 2013, pp. 124–126: “The Making Of… Hotline Miami” (the question; Super Carnage; GameMaker; nine months; Kick-Ass, Cocaine Cowboys, Drive; the AI as puzzle design; the Gamescom rating; M.O.O.N., Scattle and Perturbator; Vlambeer and Devolver; Rezzed; just over 300,000 copies on PC; the PS3 and Vita port).
- Edge issue 256, August 2013, p. 63: Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number at E3, begun as an expansion.
- Retro Gamer issue 119, October 2013, p. 101: Vita review (£6.49, 87%).
- Steam store page, Hotline Miami (web): release date 23 October 2012. https://store.steampowered.com/app/219150/Hotline_Miami/
- Wikipedia, “Hotline Miami” (web, secondary): the later platform release dates; Wrong Number released 10 March 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Miami