Hotline Miami is a 2012 top-down shooter game developed by Dennaton Games and published by Devolver Digital for Windows. The game is set in 1989 Miami, and revolves primarily around an unnamed silent protagonist—dubbed "Jacket" by fans—receiving coded messages on his answering machine instructing him to commit massacres against the local Russian mafia. The gameplay blends a top-down perspective with stealth, and the story features extreme violence and surreal storytelling, along with a soundtrack and visuals inspired by 1980s culture.
The game was developed as a spiritual successor to a cancelled game from 2004 referred to as Super Carnage, where the goal was to kill as many people as possible. The game was developed within a nine-month span and released on 23 October 2012 for Windows. In 2013, the game was ported to OS X and Linux on 18 March and 9 September, respectively, while Abstraction Games ported the game to the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita on 25 June 2013 and PlayStation 4 on 19 August 2014.
Upon release, Hotline Miami received critical acclaim, with praise particularly focused on its narrative, themes, soundtrack, color palette, and gameplay. It has since been considered to be one of the greatest games of all time, along with being cited as a highly influential independent video game and as a notable cult video game. The success of its publisher, Devolver Digital, has been attributed to the success of the game. A sequel, Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number, was released in March 2015. Hotline Miami was re-released alongside its sequel as part of Hotline Miami: Collected Edition in Japan in 2015 and as part of the Hotline Miami Collection in August 2019.
Gameplay
A screenshot of the player engaging in a standoff with the Russian Mafia. The points are visible on the top right of the image.
Hotline Miami is a top-down shooter game set in Miami during the 1980s.[2] The game is divided into divided into several chapters,[3] which is further divided up into floors.[4] At the beginning of each chapter, the player character "Jacket"[a] receives a message his answering machine, instructing him to travel to a different part of Miami and eliminate all enemies there. The player is able to defeat their opponents through a variety of melee and ranged attacks, ranging from knives and crowbars to guns.[2] Additional methods available to the player include knocking out enemies with a door, using them as a human shield as defense, or kicking them against the wall. If the enemy isn't immediately killed in an attack, the player can perform a finishing move.[4][6]
Before each chapter begins, the player can choose from a variety of animal masks, which grant different abilities depending on the mask chosen. These attributes include the players gunshots being silenced or finishing moves being sped up.[4] Both the player and enemies can be felled from a single attack. To compensate, the player is able to quickly restart the current stage after death, allowing the player to rethink their strategy.[7] Additional types of enemies that appear throughout the game, such as dogs.[7] Additionally, enemy AI is inconsistent, with reactions to attacks ranging from responding immediately to attacks or sounds to doing absolutely nothing.[3]
The player is awarded points with each enemy they kill, with the amount of points awarded being determined by the method of execution or the amount of enemies killed in a short duration of time.[6] At the end of each chapter, the players total score is tallied up and the player is given a final rating based on their performance. High scores will unlock new masks and weapons for the player to use.[8][4]
Plot
In April 1989, Jacket receives a message on his answering machine and a package is delivered to his door containing a rooster mask. Alongside the package, there are strict instructions advising Jacket to retrieve a briefcase from the Russian mafia at a metro station. Jacket continues to receive messages on his answering machine instructing him to conduct more massacres. After each massacre, Jacket visits a store or a restaurant where a man known as Beard[b] meets him and gives away free items such as pizza, films, and alcoholic beverages. During an assault on the estate of a film producer, Jacket rescues a girl and takes her to his apartment, nursing her back to good health and developing a romantic relationship with her. After this assault, Jacket is visited by three masked personas who question him for his actions, with these encounters continuing throughout the game. In another assault on a phone company, Jacket finds everybody dead except another operative known as the Biker, who is attempting to access a computer, and the two fight to the death.[c]
As Jacket continues his massacres, his perception of reality becomes increasingly more surreal. Talking corpses begin appearing at Beard's places of work, and eventually Beard himself abruptly dies, replaced by a bald man named Richter that offers Jacket nothing. After coming home one night, Jacket discovers his girlfriend murdered and a rat-masked man on his couch, who shoots him and places him into a coma. In one final encounter with the masked persona Richard, he tells Jacket that he will "never see the full picture". It is afterwards revealed that Jacket was reliving the events of the past two months while comatose after being shot by Richter. After waking up, Jacket overhears that his attacker has been put in police custody, and escapes the hospital in search of him. He storms Miami police headquarters, killing everyone inside and finds his attacker to be Richter, who had also been receiving messages on his answering machine. After interrogating him, Jacket spares his life and steals the file on the police investigations of the killings before heading to a nightclub that the calls were tracked to. He finds the address to be that of the Russian Mafia headquarters, kills all of the guards, and confronts both leaders of the syndicate. After Jacket kills his personal bodyguard and injures his hands, one of the leaders "spares him the pleasure" and commits suicide. When Jacket confronts the other, he contemplates the things he did and allows Jacket to kill him without resistance. Afterwards, a victorious Jacket walks out onto the balcony and lights a cigarette, taking a photo out of his pocket and throwing it out.
After the completion of the Jacket levels, the player unlocks a series of levels where the player character is the Biker. Similarly to Jacket, the Biker has been receiving messages on his answering machine, and is dedicated to identify the source of the messages. After the encounter with Jacket depicted earlier and various interrogations, he finds the source of the messages to be 50 Blessings, a group operated by two janitors that attempts to undermine the Russo-American Coalition, which they view as "anti-American", by ordering their operatives to commit numerous anti-Russian massacres. The game features two endings, with the full ending requiring the player to find puzzle pieces scattered throughout the game to crack 50 Blessings' password. If the player manages to crack the password, the Biker uncovers their secrets and political agenda. Without the password, the Biker is mocked and fails to discover the truth. In both endings, the player has the option to either kill or spare the janitors. Afterwards, the Biker departs from Miami.[10][11]
Themes
Hotline Miami advocates an anti-violence message through making the player feel guilt for their in-game massacres.[12] The game utilizes upbeat music and a score system to drive the player to commit the massacres, though the violence in each killing is emphasized through gruesome executions that have over exaggerated gore. Examples of these executions include disfiguring enemies with boiling water, shooting dogs with shotguns, and bashing enemy heads in with baseball bats. As the game is fast paced, the player may enter a state where they're focused exclusively on their inputs and become desensitized to the actions they are committing, assuming they weren't desensitized to begin with.[10][12] At the end of each level, the upbeat music is replaced with ambience as the player exits the building as the motionless, gory remains of enemies flood the floor.[10]
Throughout the game, the aforementioned masked personas that appear in Jacket's dreams attempt to make the player question themselves over their actions. Each of the masked personas serve a specific purpose in these encounters; the yellow-tinted Richard is often inquisitive, the blue-tinted Don Juan is often passive and friendly, while the red-tinted Rasmus is extremely aggressive. Don Juan interrogates the player through messages such as "knowing oneself means acknowledging one’s actions", while Richard does so with more direct messages such as "do you like hurting other people?" The masked figures also foreshadow upcoming events in the game's narrative. For example, after the player kills Biker, Richard warns Jacket that he will be "all alone soon." Shortly after, Jacket and his girlfriend are shot by Richter, and Jacket wakes up from a coma months later.[10][11] Contrarily to the masked personas, the group of janitors that operate 50 Blessings attempt to justify the massacres the player commits, with one stating that "they were all scum anyway, weren’t they?"[11]
In 2004, Jonatan Söderström began work on a game known as Super Carnage and was one of his first games, developed with the goal being for him to make the "goriest game possible".[13] The game was a top-down shoot-em-up with the goal to kill as many people as possible. The game was remade a year later, but was cancelled following difficulties with programming AI pathfinding.[13] The game was cancelled and tossed into the "'unfinished and unreleased' box" alongside an estimated 150 other unfinished prototypes.[14][15][16] Years later, Söderström met Dennis Wedin, singer and keyboard player in the band Fucking Werewolf Asso. The two would go on to create a promotional game for it titled Keyboard Drumset Fucking Werewolf and a game known as Life/Death/Island. Life/Death/Island would later be cancelled, and Söderström and Wedin encountered financial difficulties. They then decided that their next game would be a commercial release. Going through Söderström's unfinished games, Wedin saw the potential of the Super Carnage prototype and the two began development.[14] This new project was originally called Cocaine Cowboy, named after the documentary Cocaine Cowboys.[17]
The game began development in 2011 using GameMaker as the engine. It was to be the first game of the newly founded Dennaton Games. Shortly after development began, Cocaine Cowboy was renamed to Hotline Miami.[17] The game was developed over the span of nine months with little budget, no proper release planning, and was described by Wedin as "fucking hard."[14] The team had difficulty developing the game's pathfinding and ran into limitations using their preferred version of GameMaker.[14] One issue found during playtesting the developers described as a "pain in the ass" was that the game would frequently crash when a printer was connected to their computer.[18]
The game was designed with fluid combat and combo windows[clarification needed] in mind, going as far as to make sure enemies would not run away from players. While the developers did not want to have a large amount of dialog and cutscenes in the game, prioritizing gameplay first and foremost, the developers added the game's masked personas to try and push an anti-violence message and prevent real-world massacres.[18] Influences for the game included David Lynch, Gordon Freeman from the Half-Life series, and the movies Kick-Ass and Drive.[19][20] During the game's development, the developers stayed in contact with other teams, and a copy of the game was sent to Devolver Digital by Vlambeer. After playing the demo, Devolver Digital contacted Dennaton, offering to publish the full game. While they were initially hesitant with working with a publisher, they agreed to do it[18][14] as the publishing contract was very simple.[21]
Music
The developers decided early on that they did not want the game's music "to sound like video game music," but instead tried to "capture the essence of the 80s." When they could not obtain the licenses for the temporary soundtrack that they had chosen early in development, Söderström found new composers for the game by searching free tracks on Bandcamp. Tracks were licensed from composer M.O.O.N. to be used in the game, while composer Scattle created a score for the game directly.[17] Several other artists had their music licensed for the game, or composed new music for it, such as Sun Araw and Jasper Byrne.[22][23] The game's soundtrack has been released on Steam and SoundCloud.[24][25] A physical vinyl release of the soundtrack was revealed in March 2016 after a Kickstarter campaign reached a goal of $57,000.[26]
Marketing and release
Devolver Digital would bring a demo of the game to the 2012 Rezzed Expo, where it won Game of the Show.[14] Swedish painter Niklas Åkerblad would draw the game's box art.[27] Leading up to the release of Hotline Miami, Devolver Digital opened a phone line in Miami, Florida, to enable people to call and leave voice messages of their own.[28]Hotline Miami released for Windows on 23 October 2012.[29] Shortly after the release of the game, a trailer was created using the voice messages left by fans.[30]
In early November 2012, an update for the game added support for gamepad control, multiple bug fixes, a few gameplay tweaks, graphical adjustments, and a new bonus map called 'Highball'.[31] At the end of 2012, Devolver Digital revealed that 130,000 copies of the game had been sold in the game's first seven weeks.[32] Around this time, Söderström released a patch to a torrented version of the game, with Devolver Digital stating that he did not want people "playing the buggy version of his game however they got it."[32]
In 2013, the game was released for OS X on 19 March and 19 September for Linux.[33][34] It was released for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita on 25 June in North America and 26 June in Europe.[35] The title would be cross-buy, allowing those who have purchased the game on either Vita or PlayStation 3 to play it across both platforms, only having to buy it once.[citation needed] The port was handled by Abstraction Games,[36] who shifted the engine from Game Maker 7 to PhyreEngine, adding enhanced controls, an extra unlockable mask, and online leaderboards. These features were later added for existing Windows owners as a patch.[citation needed]
On 28 May 2013, Hotline Miami was featured on the eighth Humble Indie Bundle as one of the games offered if paying above the average amount. On 24 June 2013, the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita versions of Hotline Miami were released.[37] When asked about the possibility of an iOS port, the developers rejected the idea.[38] On 24 March 2014, Devolver Digital announced that the game would be headed to the PlayStation 4 with cross-buy support with the PlayStation 3 and Vita.[39] The PlayStation 4 version of Hotline Miami was released on 19 August in North America and 20 August in Europe.[40][41] The game continued to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, and by May 2015, the game's sales had reached 1.5 million copies.[42]
Hotline Miami released to generally positive reviews. Metacritic calculated a score of 85 based on 51 reviews for the Windows version, 87 based on 19 reviews on PlayStation 3, and 85 based on 27 reviews on PlayStation Vita.[43]
The fast-paced gameplay of Hotline Miami was praised. Several reviewers considered the game to be enjoyable despite constant death, with some attributing the enjoyment to the ability to restart quickly;[2][4][44]Polygon's Chris Plante compared playing the game to be similar to playing a sport,[6] and Graham Smith of PC Gamer wrote that the game was meant to "inspire a fever."[7] Citing the game's short length, though still enjoying the game, GameSpot's Danny O'Dwyer compared playing the game to doing cocaine, writing that "like most cocaine-fueled rampages, it's short-lived but memorable."[4] Some criticisms were made towards the games controls and length, with Ben Reeves of Game Informer writing that the controls inhibited what was otherwise "one of the most creative indie titles of the year".[2]
The game's atmosphere and art direction were very positively received. Cameron of VideoGamer.com wrote that the atmosphere does "an awfully good job of desensitizing you to the violence".[46] Smith of PC Gamer praised the game's story for not attempting to give a cliché justification for the player's violence.[7] Danny O'Dwyer of GameSpot described the game as a "wonderful barrage of the senses".[4] The atmosphere and violence was not without some criticism however, such as that from Chris Kohler of Wired, who named Hotline Miami the "most disgusting video game of all time".[48]
The soundtrack was acclaimed across various publications for working with the game's atmosphere. Reeves of Game Informer praised the music, describing it to "perfectly place you inside the mind of a serial killer".[2] Giancarlo Saldana of GamesRadar+ and Onyett of IGN described the music as "very effective" and "meshing perfectly" respectively.[3][8]
Awards
Before release, the game was the recipient of both Eurogamer's and Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Game of the Show award at their inaugural EGX Rezzed expo.[49][50] After release, the game received the "Best PC Sound" accolade by IGN from its "Best of 2012" awards.[51] It was also nominated for "Best PC Action Game",[52] "Best PC Story",[53] "Best PC Game",[54] "Best Overall Action Game",[55] "Best Overall Music",[56] and "Best Overall Game".[57]PC Gamer awarded the game with "The Best Music of the Year 2012".[58] At the 2012 Machinima'sInside Gaming Awards, the game received the "Most Original Game" award.[59][60]
Legacy
Hotline Miami has been considered one of the greatest video games ever made, one of the most influential indie games ever made, and has amassed a cult following.[27] The success of the game has been linked to the success of Devolver Digital, being considered the publisher's breakout title.[61] Devolver Digital has gone on to publish many different titles, becoming one of the most influential publishers for indie games.[21][62] In 2023, TechRadar described Hotline Miami as the "gold standard" of indie games.[63]
In a retrospective article from Vice's Cameron Kunzelman, he described the anti-violence messages portrayed by Hotline Miami as an "emblem of a forgotten regime." He highlighted its release in a time where he believed violence was used to demonstrate "seriousness" in storytelling, with examples such as the trailer for The Last of Us (2013) where a person's head is shot off with a shotgun. Comparing that to now, where Kunzelman believes the video game industry and critics have become desensitized to violence in video games, he argued that video games were due "another shift" in how violence was treated, and that the original messages of Hotline Miami had been lost.[12]
In 2012, Söderström and Wedin said they were looking to create downloadable content for Hotline Miami,[20] which was later expanded to a full sequel.[64] After being officially announced at E3 in June 2013,[65]Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number was released for Windows on 10 March 2015.[66] The sequel received generally lower reviews compared to the first game.[67] The game was relatively controversial upon its release, and it was subject to a ban in Australia due to its sexual imagery.[68] In 2019, Dennaton Games denied that a third entry is in development.[69] An eight-part comic book series published by Behemoth Comics, titled Hotline Miami: Wildlife, was physically distributed to comic book stores and traditional book stores by Simon & Schuster and Diamond Comic Distributors beginning monthly in September 2020 after their initial digital release in 2016.[70] A parody of Hotline Miami was included in Devolver Bootleg (2019), known as "Hotline Milwaukee", which was a version of the game with simplified movement that gave dogs the ability to use guns.[71] A figure of Jacket was revealed in 2014, featuring several different masks that could be swapped out.[72]
Two compilations containing both games in the series have been released, Hotline Miami: Collected Edition and Hotline Miami Collection. Hotline Miami: Collected Edition was released in Japan on 25 June 2015 for the PlayStation 4 and was sold at retail,[73] while Hotline Miami Collection was released for Nintendo Switch digitally on 19 August 2019,[74]Xbox One on 7 April 2020,[75][76]Stadia on 22 September 2020,[77] and PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on 23 October 2023.[78] Two limited physical releases of the Hotline Miami Collection were released online by Special Reserve Games in 2020 and 2021.[79] Several fangames and mods based on the series have been created. The most notorious of these was the controversial Midnight Animal, a Persona inspired mod that was abandoned in 2018 after severe backlash towards the creators' actions.[80]
^Jacket is a fan-assigned name to an otherwise unnamed protagonist. The name was adopted by Dennaton themselves afterwards.[5]
^Similarly to Jacket, Beard goes unnamed in the game, but is referred to as such elsewhere. In Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number, the character is known as The Soldier.[9]
^Jacket and the Biker fight each other twice, with both times having a different outcome.[10] Both are seen alive in Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number.
^ abcVujanov, Jovana (2021). "The Emptiness of Hardcore: Consuming Violence in Hotline: Miami". Polish Journal for American Studies. 15: 303–315. doi:10.7311/PJAS.15/2/2021.09 (inactive 2 April 2024).((cite journal)): CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of April 2024 (link)
^ abCameron, Phill (24 October 2012). "Hotline Miami Review". VideoGamer.com. Candy Banana. Archived from the original on 17 September 2013. Retrieved 26 November 2015.
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