Hotline Miami

The protagonist dubbed "Jacket" in a standoff with the Russian Mafia on the chapter 'Hot & Heavy'

Hotline Miami is divided into several chapters, each of which is further broken down into several stages. At the start of most chapters, the player character "Jacket" wakes up in his apartment and listens to cryptic messages on his answering machine. These messages tell him to perform an arbitrary task at a certain location, which in each case is inferred as a euphemism for killing every person at that location (e.g., "giving VIPs at a hotel a great stay" or "taking care of a pest infestation").[2] Prior to commencing a mission, the player is asked to select an animal mask to wear, each of which—with the exception of "Richard", the default rooster mask—provides a unique benefit, such as faster movement or a starting weapon.[3]

In each stage, the player navigates a building from a top-down perspective, where the goal is almost always to kill every opponent therein. Occasionally, they must defeat a boss at the end of the chapter or find key items as they explore. Some levels include hidden animal masks for the player to find along the way, often on the bodies of other killers who failed the assignment now being undertaken by "Jacket".[4]

The player usually starts each assignment unarmed, just outside the target location. Melee and ranged weapons can be collected off enemies or the environment. The player must rely on their increased awareness (being able to see inside every room within a large radius) and either stealth or overwhelming force to overcome challenges. As the player is no more resilient to attacks than enemies, getting shot or hit once often leads to death.[4] Attacks such as punches, weapon throws and door slams knock enemies down, prompting the player to gruesomely execute them on the ground.[5] In addition to the more common white suit-wearing mobsters, the player is later pitched against guard dogs, police officers, and other opponents that require different strategies to defeat.[5]

Enemy artificial intelligence causes them to occasionally move unpredictably and makes it difficult to plan a perfect approach. To make up for this, Hotline Miami allows the player to restart each stage as soon as they die, allowing them to quickly fine-tune their approach over several attempts. At the end of most chapters, the game grades the player's performance based on factors such as speed, variation and recklessness, with high scores unlocking new weapons and additional masks.[4]

On a day in 1989, Jacket[lower-alpha 1] 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 dubbed "Beard" 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, and these continue throughout the rest of the game. In another assault on a phone company, Jacket finds everybody dead except another operative known as "Biker"[lower-alpha 1], who is attempting to access a computer, and the two fight to the death.[lower-alpha 2]

As Jacket continues his massacres, his perception of reality becomes increasingly more surreal and twisted. Talking corpses begin appearing at Beard's places of work, until Beard himself abruptly dies, being replaced by a bald man dubbed "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. In one final encounter with the masked persona Richard, it is revealed that Jacket was in a coma and that he was reliving the events of the past two months while comatose. Jacket overhears that his attacker has been put in police custody, where he escapes the hospital and storms Miami police headquarters, killing all inside. Jacket finds his attacker to be Richter, who had also been receiving messages on his answering machine. After interrogating him, Jacket spares his life[lower-alpha 3] and steals the file on the police investigations of the killings before heading to a nightclub that the calls were tracked to, where he finds the address to the headquarters of the Miami Russian mafia. Jacket travels to the headquarters, kills all of the guards, and confronts both leaders of the syndicate. After killing his personal bodyguard and injuring his hands, one of the leaders "spares him the pleasure" and commits suicide, while the other 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.

In an epilogue starring Biker, he assaults different mafia locations while attempting to identify the source of the messages being left on his answering machine. After an encounter with Jacket[lower-alpha 2] and various interrogations, the source of the messages is identified as 50 Blessings, who he later confronts directly. If the player manages to crack the password of 50 Blessings, Biker successfully uncovers their secrets and their political agenda of utilizing operatives to destroy the Russo-American Coalition. Without the password, Biker is mocked and 50 Blessings cover up their agenda successfully, preventing Biker from discovering the truth.

A screenshot of the unreleased Super Carnage demo from 2004, which would later serve as the prototype for Hotline Miami.[6][7]

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".[6] 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.[6] The game was cancelled and tossed into the "'unfinished and unreleased' box" alongside an estimated 150 other unfinished prototypes.[7][8][9] 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. After the cancellation of Life/Death/Island, Söderström and Wedin encountered financial difficulties, which they then decided 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.[7] This new project was originally called Cocaine Cowboy, named after the documentary of the same name.[10]

The game began development in 2011 using GameMaker as the first game of the newly founded Dennaton Games. Shortly after development began, Cocaine Cowboy was renamed to Hotline Miami.[10] 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".[7] The team experienced various challenges with developing the game's pathfinding and the limitations of an outdated version of GameMaker.[7] One issue that was described as a "pain in the ass" for the developers was when playtesters experienced frequent game crashes when a printer was connected to their computer.[11]

The game was designed with fluid combat and combo windows 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.[11] Influences for the game included David Lynch, Gordon Freeman from the Half-Life series, and the movies Kick-Ass and Drive.[12][13] During the games difficult 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[11][7] as the publishing contract was very simple.[14]

Devolver Digital would bring a demo of the game to the 2012 Rezzed Expo, where it won Game of the Show.[7] Swedish painter Niklas Åkerblad would draw the game's box art.[1] 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.[20] Hotline Miami released for Windows on 23 October 2012.[21] Shortly after the release of the game, a trailer was created using the voice messages left by fans.[22]

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'.[23] 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.[24] 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."[24]

In 2013, the game was released for OS X on 19 March and 19 September for Linux.[25][26] It was released for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita on 25 June in North America and 26 June in Europe.[27] 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. The port was handled by Abstraction Games,[28] 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.

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.[29] When asked about the possibility of an iOS port, the developers rejected the idea, further commenting that the controls would "suck".[30] 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.[31] The PlayStation 4 version of Hotline Miami was released on 19 August in North America and 20 August in Europe.[32][33] The game continued to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, and by May 2015, the game's sales had reached 1.5 million copies.[34]

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.[68] The success of the game has been linked to the success of Devolver Digital, being considered the publisher's breakout title.[69] Devolver Digital has gone on to publish many different titles, becoming one of the most influential publishers for indie games.[14][70] In 2023, TechRadar referred to the game as the "gold standard" of indie games.[71]

In 2012, Söderström and Wedin said they were looking to create downloadable content for Hotline Miami,[13] which was later expanded to a full sequel.[72] After being officially announced at E3 in June 2013,[73] Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number was released for Windows on 10 March 2015.[74] The sequel received generally lower reviews compared to the first game.[75] The game was relatively controversial upon its release, and it was subject to a ban in Australia due to its sexual imagery.[76] In 2019, Dennaton Games denied that a third entry is in development.[77] 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.[78] 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.[79]

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 exclusively in Japan on 25 June 2015 for the PlayStation 4 and was sold at retail,[80] while Hotline Miami Collection was released for Nintendo Switch digitally on 19 August 2019,[81] Xbox One on 7 April 2020,[82] Stadia on 22 September 2020,[83] and PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on 23 October 2023.[84] Two limited physical releases of the Hotline Miami Collection were released online by Special Reserve Games in 2020 and 2021.[85] 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.[86] More fan games have been created, usually based on two games at once, such as "Half-Line Miami",[87]"Midnight Mercenaries",[88] and "SUPERHOTline Miami".[89] A fan film known as "Wreck It Richard" was created in January 2013 by PulpitPower, featuring Jacket invading several "classic" video games such as Pac-Man and massacring all characters within them.[90] In 2019, developer Puppet Combo recreated the first level of Hotline Miami as a 3D game with PS1 era graphics.[91]

Several video games have been inspired either directly or indirectly by Hotline Miami, many from Devolver Digital.[92] Some of games include Mother Russia Bleeds (2016),[92] Katana Zero,[93] The Hong Kong Massacre,[94] and Ape Out (2019),[92] as well as Otxo and Anger Foot (nicknamed by developers as "Hotline Amsterdam") (2023).[92] The game was featured in The Last of Us Part II (2020)[95] and was featured in a crossover with Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes (2019).[96][92] The aforementioned The Hong Kong Massacre was an inspiration for a scene in the film John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023).[94] Hotline Miami has been considered a primary reason for the popularization of synthwave alongside the film Drive.[97] Jacket has appeared in crossovers with Payday 2 (2013),[98] Dead Cells (2019),[99] and Fall Guys (2020).[100] A figure of Jacket was revealed in 2014, featuring several different masks that could be swapped out.[101]

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