You enter a building, you kill everyone inside, you leave, you get pizza. Ultraviolent and subversive as hell, Hotline Miami was one of the most notorious and acclaimed indie releases of 2012, a blood-soaked, retro-tinged collision of Grand Theft Auto and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive.



Created by the Swedish duo Jonatan Söderström and Dennis Wedin, the game follows an unnamed hitman (later known by fans as “Jacket”) carrying out a series of viscera-smeared murder missions for a panel of masked lunatics. As the action progresses, reality caves in, the levels and story sequences becoming ever more disturbed. Remaining constant, however, is the super-slick top-down action: most gunfights are over in milliseconds, and on trickier levels, with multiple enemies, players often have to restart dozens of times to get through every bullet-riddled confrontation.

For the past two years, Söderström and Wedin (aka Dennaton Games) have been working on a sequel, subtitled “Wrong Number”. It’s set in the bloody aftermath of the original title, but in a postmodern twist, it seems the characters are aware of Hotline Miami as a product. “This time around we’re focusing on telling the whole story,” says Wedin. “In the first game, the character was kind of blank, which worked at the time - but for this one, we have a lot of playable characters so we want to give them more personality; we’re trying to tell the story in a different way. It’s still going to be very vague though. We give you the whole picture, but you have to put it together.”

Pigs and players



This time round, there’s Pig Butcher, the star of a disturbing 1990’s horror movie based on the incidents depicted in the first game. Then there are The Fans, a group of devout Hotline Miami fanatics who work themselves into a copycat frenzy of violence. Once again, the Dennaton team seems interested in toying with both the conventions and criticisms of violent games; analysing notions of player autonomy and culpability in the maelstrom of pixelated gore. “The meta-game is different this time, though,” corrects Wedin. “In the first we were sort of saying, ‘oh you’re a horrible person for liking violence’, for this one we’re going to do things … differently.”

There has already been controversy. In a playable demo of the game shown this year, players guided Pig Butcher through a typical Hotline Miami level, blasting enemies and collecting more powerful weapons. However, the character then arrives in a room where he discovers a woman begging for her life, and appears to be about to sexually assault her. An onscreen director shouts “cut” and we realise this is a movie scene.



Although ostensibly an attempt to critique the marginalisation and objectification of female game characters, many writers found the scene distressing and manipulative, and it was removed from the demo.

Wedin, it seems, still believes the scene has a narrative role, later telling The Escapist: “There is a meaning to these two characters. There’s a lot more to them than just this scene. You get a bigger picture when you play the whole game.” When I asked about the status of the sequence and whether it would figure in the final game, he would only say: “We are still working on how to present that in the best possible way.”

Meaning in Miami



But then, Denaton has always avoided direct interpretation of its game, allowing players to perceive the original as just a mindless blaster if they wanted. “The whole idea was, if you just want a cool arcade game and don’t want to be lectured or forced to read a story, you can skip all that and have a cool time,” says Wedin. “It was important that the game was fun, with flashing point indicators, cool combos – when you finish a level and realise what you’ve done, it works so much better that way, rather than making the horror more explicit. When you play the level, it’s more of an obstacle course, you’re killing for points and combos – there’s nothing else that you’re after.”

Indeed, in terms of mechanics, Hotline Miami has more in common with classic scrolling shooters like R-Type, then GTA. The focus is on twitch-based controls, combos and one-shot-one-kill encounters. It is killing as puzzle solving.



It’s the stuff wrapped around the game that lends an air of post-modern commentary. The weird set-up for each mission, the pizza parlours and video stores visited by Jacket after completing levels, the visual hints that this is all some kind of brutal hallucination. Hotline Miami messes around with notions of narrative meaning and causality as the world crumbles around you.



“We made a game we wanted to buy, but couldn’t,” says Wedin. “The way we portrayed the story was different from how most games do. They have cut-scenes and characters talking in your face for ten minutes, so you really get what the plan is – we just wanted to hide the story. We didn’t know if people were going to get it and it took a while; in the beginning people were saying, ‘oh this game has no story at all’, but then others started to say, ‘wait, have you seen this? It may mean that’. And it was like, boom.”

Fans started to theorise over every detail: the identity of the gangsters who hand out the jobs; the over-friendly man who greets Jacket whenever he enters a store or fast-food joint; the meaning of the masks that Jacket wears to give him different perks; the contents of his apartment.



“I loved that!” exclaims Wedin. “All this stuff, like things moving around in Jacket’s apartment – it was nice to see people taking the effort to figure out those details. It’s something we’re working hard on for the sequel – telling the story within the environment. We’re going all in, trying to give every level some story elements. We’re not telling you everything, but we want to make it interesting for the player to look around and try to figure stuff out.”

Branching out



Wrong Number is, according to Wedin, a much bigger game than the original, with not only multiple playable characters (including women), but also multiple time lines. Everyone gets their own specialist fighting skills – some weapons-based, some melee – and players will be able to switch between them. They also have their own soundtracks and their own routes into missions: not every level starts with a phone call and a barked order. And not all of them wear masks.

“We’re doing some really cool stuff with how the levels connects,” says Wedin. “We’re keeping the intros and outros to each stage, but some are the same when you switch characters. You can play a level as one character then maybe later you’re come back and play it again as someone else.”

The team is also working on a level editor, which will allow players to create their own missions, complete with all the objects, guns, characters and masks from the main game. Wedin says they’re also planning a narrative constructor so fans can essentially build their own sequels, and a sharing function to help distribute them; but some of the more advanced features may have to wait until updates.

For a pretty obtuse, retro-stylised shooter, Hotline Miami has built a huge audience, spanning both indie connoisseurs and blast-’em-up purists. Wedin, says it’s not just down to the game’s compulsive rhythm of violence and reward; it’s about crediting the player with agency and intelligence.



“Most games hold the player’s hand all the time,” he groans. “When you’re almost dead, there’s always a health pack around the corner; when you’re out of ammo, you get a new gun. Most triple A games are trying to make a movie – when you die, you have to go through ten cinematic sequences just to get back in. But it’s not bad to die!

“Back in the old days, games were like, ‘you’re dead, let’s go again’. That’s what we want. We want players to be reckless”.

Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number will be launched on PC, PS3, PS4, and Vita. Release date is TBC