Hotline Miami
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, and PlayStation 4 on 19 August 2014. 
Upon release, Hotline Miami received critical acclaim, with praise regarding its narrative, themes, music 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 Hotline Miami has been attributed to the success of its publisher, Devolver Digital. 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 for PlayStation 4 in Japan in 2015 and as part of the Hotline Miami Collection for Nintendo Switch in August 2019.

Gameplay
Hotline Miami is divided into several chapters, each of which is further broken down into several stages. At the start of most chapters, "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"). 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.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 in the bodies of other killers who failed the assignment now being undertaken by "Jacket".The player usually starts each assignment unarmed, just outside the target location. Most enemies carry a wide variety of melee and ranged weapons which can be collected both from their bodies and 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 character is no more resilient to attacks than enemies, getting shot or hit once often leads to death. Despite the game's high lethality, attacks such as punches, weapon throws and door slams merely knock enemies down, prompting the player to gruesomely execute them on the ground. 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.Enemy artificial intelligence varies slightly, causing them to occasionally move unpredictably and making 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.

Synopsis
Setting and characters
Hotline Miami takes place in 1989 Miami, Florida where the Russian mafia has occupied the city. At the dismay of the Russian mafia and a joint coalition between the United States and the Soviet Union, a mysterious group known as "50 Blessings" sends anonymous messages to people's answering machines, instructing them to conduct various anti-Russian massacres.
The operatives of 50 Blessings in the games plot are:

Jacket - An unnamed protagonist dubbed as such for his letterman jacket, he is the first person to be contacted by 50 Blessings and serves as the main character in the story, conducting most of the anti-Russian massacres. He wears a variety of masks in the game, though he is usually identified with a chicken mask in promotional material.
Biker - Another operative of 50 Blessings that confronts the 50 Blessings in his own epilogue chapter in an effort to uncover the truth. He wears a  turquoise motorcycle helmet.
Richter - Another operative of the 50 Blessings that is responsible for the murder of Jacket's girlfriend. He wears a rat mask.
The Janitors - While not operatives, the janitors are the root cause of the cryptic messages sent to the answering machines of the operatives. The designs of the characters are based on the games developers.Other characters that are not operatives of 50 Blessings include:

Masked Personas - Known as Richard, Rasmus, and Don Juan, the Masked Personas visit Jacket and question him for his massacres against the Russian mafia. Richard has an optimistic viewpoint of the players actions, while Rasmus is aggressive towards the player, and Don Juan is sympathetic and more peaceful.
The Girlfriend - A girl saved by Jacket early in the games story and becomes Jacket's girlfriend throughout the game. She is later killed by Richter.

Plot
On a day in 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 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", who is attempting to access a computer. The two fight to the death with Jacket winning.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 and steals the file on the police investigations of the killings. Jacket raids a mob-owned nightclub that the calls were tracked to, before finding the address to the headquarters of the Miami Russian mafia.
Jacket travels to the address and storms the headquarters, killing the guards and confronting 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, Jacket walks out onto the balcony and lights a cigarette, taking out a photo in his pocket in the process and throwing it out.
In the epilogue starring Biker, he assaults three different mafia locations while attempting to identify the source of the messages being left on his answering machine. After an encounter with Jacket 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.

Development
Hotline Miami first originated as a 2004 game known as Super Carnage. The game was created by Jonatan Söderström as a top-down shoot-em-up as one of his first games with the goal to kill as many people as possible. The game was cancelled following difficulties with programming AI pathfinding and tossed into the "'unfinished and unreleased’ box" alongside around up to 150 other unfinished prototypes.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 the band Keyboard Drumset Fucking Werewolf and a cancelled game known as Life/Death/Island. After the cancellation of Life/Death/Island, Söderström and Wedin encountered financial difficulties and were running out of money, 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. This new project was originally called Cocaine Cowboy, named after the documentary of the same name.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. 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". The team experienced various challenges with developing the games pathfinding and the limitations of an outdated version of GameMaker. 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.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 games masked personas to try and push an anti-violence message and prevent real world massacres. Influences for the game included David Lynch, Gordon Freeman from the Half-Life series, and the movies Kick-Ass and Drive.Despite the games challenging development, the developers would stay in contact with other teams, and a copy of the game was sent to Devolver Digital by the team at Vlambeer. Devolver Digital would contact Dennaton, offering to publish the full game. While they were initially hesitant with working with a publisher, they agreed to do it, as the publishing contract was very simple.

Music
The developers early on decided that they "didn't want the game music to sound like video game music" to try and "capture the essence of the 80s". When they couldn't obtain the licenses for the "temporary soundtrack" they chose early in development, Söderström found composers for the game through searching free tracks on Bandcamp. Tracks were licensed out from composer M.O.O.N. for use in the game, while composer Scattle and Prunty created a score for the game directly. Several other artists had their music licensed for the game or composed music for the game itself, such as Sun Araw and Jasper Bryne. The games soundtrack has been released on the Steam platform and SoundCloud. A physical vinyl release of the soundtrack was revealed and released on 11 March 2016 after a Kickstarter raised $57,000.

Marketing and release
Devolver Digital would bring a demo of the game to the 2012 Rezzed Expo, where it won Game of the Show. Swedish painter Niklas Åkerblad would draw the games box art. 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. Hotline Miami released for Windows on 23 October 2012. Shortly after the release of the game, a trailer was created using these voice messages left by fans.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'. At the end of 2012, Devolver Digital revealed that 130,000 copies of the game had been sold in the games first seven weeks. Around this time, Söderström released a patch to a torrented version of the game, with Devolver Digital stating that he didn't want people "playing the buggy version of his game however they got it".The game was released for OS X on 19 March and 19 September 2013. In mid-February 2013, Devolver Digital and developer Dennaton Games confirmed that the game would be coming to PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita in the summer of the same year. 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, 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 PC owners as a patch.On 28 May 2013, it 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. When asked about the possibility of an iOS port, the developers commented that the controls would suck. 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. The PlayStation 4 version of Hotline Miami was released on 19 August 2014. The game continued to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, and by May 2015, the games sales had reached 1,500,000 copies.

Reception
Critical reception
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.The game's fast paced gameplay were positively received by Phill Cameron of VideoGamer.com and Charles Onyett of IGN. Tom Bramwell of Eurogamer praised all parts of the gameplay and the atmosphere, describing it as addicting and that the game "only works as a whole". Criticisms of the gameplay included those by Ben Reeves of Game Informer and Graham Smith of PC Gamer, saying that the gameplay had "more style than substance" and "frantic repetition" respectively, though both still viewed the gameplay positively overall.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". Smith of PC Gamer praised the game's story for not attempting to give a cliché justification for the players violence. Danny O'Dwyer of GameSpot described the game as a "wonderful barrage of the senses". The atmosphere and violence received some criticism, such as from Chris Kohler of Wired, who named Hotline Miami the "most disgusting video game of all time".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". Giancarlo Saldana of GamesRadar+ and Onyett of IGN described the music as "very effective" and "meshing perfectly" respectively.

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. After release, the game received the "Best PC Sound" accolade by IGN from its "Best of 2012" awards. It was also nominated for "Best PC Action Game", "Best PC Story", "Best PC Game", "Best Overall Action Game", "Best Overall Music", and "Best Overall Game". PC Gamer awarded the game with "The Best Music of the Year 2012". At the 2012 Machinima's Inside Gaming Awards, the game received the "Most Original Game" award.

Legacy
Hotline Miami series
In 2012, Söderström and Wedin said they were looking to create downloadable content for Hotline Miami, which was later expanded to a full sequel. After being officially announced at E3 in June 2013, Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number was released for Windows on March 10 2015. The sequel received generally lower reviews compared to the first game. The game was relatively controversial upon its release, and it was subject to a ban in Australia due to its sexual imagery. A third entry in the series has been de-confirmed by Dennaton Games.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. 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.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, while Hotline Miami Collection was released for Nintendo Switch digitally on 19 August 2019, Xbox One on 7 April 2020, and Stadia on 22 September 2020. Two limited physical releases of the Hotline Miami Collection were released online by Special Reserve Games in 2020 and 2021.Several fangames and mods based on Hotline Miami 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. More fan games have been created, usually based on two games at once, such as "Half-Line Miami","Midnight Mercenaries", and "SUPERHOTline Miami".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. In 2019, developer Puppet Combo recreated the first level of Hotline Miami as a 3D game with PS1 era graphics.

Impact
Hotline Miami has been considered one of the greatest video games ever made and it has amassed a cult following. The success of the game has been linked to the success of Devolver Digital, being considered the publisher's breakout title. Devolver Digital has gone on to publish many different titles, becoming one of the most influential publishers for indie games.Hotline Miami has been cited as a highly influential indie game. Several video games have been inspired either directly or indirectly by Hotline Miami. These games include LA Cops and Hotline Trail (2013), Lithium City and 12 is Better than 6 (2015), Mother Russia Bleeds (2016), God's Trigger (2018), Katana Zero, The Hong Kong Massacre, and Ape Out (2019), Midnight Flight Express (2020), Otxo, Kill the Crows, and Anger Foot (nicknamed by developers as "Hotline Amsterdam") (2023). Hotline Miami has been highly influential on the topic of violence in video games, and has been referred to as the "gold standard" of indie games by TechRadar more than a decade after release.The game was featured in The Last of Us Part II (2020) and was featured in a crossover with Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes (2019). The aforementioned The Hong Kong Massacre was an inspiration for a scene in the film John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023). Hotline Miami has been considered a primary reason for the popularization of synthwave alongside the film Drive.The character Jacket has become a popular and iconic character in indie games, typically depicted as wearing the Richard mask. He has become the face of the Hotline Miami series and has been featured as a playable character in Payday 2 (2013), Dead Cells (2019), and Fall Guys (2020). A figure of Jacket was revealed in 2014, featuring several different masks that could be swapped out.

Notes
References
External links

Official website