Hotline Miami

Did You Know?

• Dennaton purchased a phone number in the Miami area that allowed people to leave messages to be used in a trailer.
• At the end of each level, the upbeat music is replaced with ambience while the player exits the building, with the remains of enemies scattered across the floor.

Plot

In April 1989, Jacket finds a message on his answering machine and a package at his door with a rooster mask inside. The package tells him to pick up a briefcase from the Russian mafia at a metro station. After he does that, more messages arrive, each ordering him to carry out additional massacres. Following every job, Jacket goes to a store or restaurant where a man called Beard gives him free stuff like pizza, movies, and alcohol.

While attacking a film producer's mansion, Jacket saves a woman and brings her to his apartment, where he cares for her until she recovers, and they start a romance. Later, three masked figures named Richard, Rasmus, and Don Juan show up and challenge him about what he's done; they keep appearing throughout the game. During a raid on a phone company, Jacket finds everyone already dead except for the Biker, who is working on a computer, and they fight until one dies.

As Jacket keeps killing, his grip on reality slips. Dead bodies that can talk start showing up at Beard's places, then Beard himself suddenly dies, and a bald guy named Richter takes over, offering nothing. One night Jacket comes home to find Richter has murdered his girlfriend, then shoots Jacket and leaves him in a coma. In a final vision, Richard says Jacket will never understand the whole truth and that he has been reliving the last two months while unconscious.

When Jacket wakes up, he hears that Richter has been caught, so he breaks out of the hospital, attacks the Miami police station, and finds Richter. He learns Richter also got the same messages, lets him live, and takes the police file on the killings. Then he goes to the nightclub where the calls were traced, kills everyone there, and moves on to the Russian Mafia base. There he wounds one boss and kills his bodyguard, causing that boss to shoot himself; the other boss just lets Jacket kill him without fighting. Jacket steps onto a balcony, lights a cigarette, and tosses a photograph over the edge.

Development

Hotline Miami came from Dennaton Games, a two-person team: Swedish programmer and designer Jonatan Söderström, and artist Dennis Wedin. Before this, Söderström made freeware indie games, including the puzzle title Tuning, which earned the Nuovo Award at the 2010 Independent Games Festival. He also left many projects unfinished. One was Super Carnage, a top-down shooter he started in 2004 when he was 18, but dropped because programming the AI proved too tricky.

Later, Söderström met Wedin, who sang and played keyboard in the synthpunk band Fucking Werewolf Asso. Together they created a promotional game for the band called Keyboard Drumset Fucking Werewolf, plus another project, Life/Death/Island. That one got scrapped when it became overwhelming. After that failure, they agreed their next game would be sold commercially.

Wedin dug through Söderström’s old unfinished work and found Super Carnage. He saw promise in it, having enjoyed similar games like Gauntlet and Chaos Engine, so they started building Hotline Miami. Its original name was Cocaine Cowboy, taken from the 2006 documentary Cocaine Cowboys. During development, Söderström shared updates on his Twitter and blog.

Reception

Critics generally liked Hotline Miami. On Metacritic, the PC version scored 85 percent from 51 reviews, the PlayStation 3 version got 87 percent from 19 reviews, and the PlayStation Vita version earned 85 percent from 27 reviews. Many reviewers enjoyed the gameplay, calling it addictive even though players die often. Chris Plante from Polygon compared it to playing a sport, saying quick restarts made up for repetition and kept it addictive.

Graham Smith of PC Gamer said the game was meant to create a fever and that it was easy to get carried away once hooked, calling it tight and efficient beyond its addictive nature. Phill Cameron of VideoGamer.com described it as five seconds of action you could lose yourself in for five hours. Danny O'Dwyer from GameSpot felt indifferent, finding the times it went wrong deeply frustrating, especially boss fights with arbitrary defeat methods. Some critics criticized the controls.

Ben Reeves of Game Informer wrote that the controls held back what was otherwise one of the year's most creative indie titles. Eric Swain of PopMatters thought the PlayStation 3 controls made the game easier, so players missed the intended feel. Giancarlo Saldana of GamesRadar+ said the PlayStation 3 controls took getting used to and that playing on a computer was more ideal.

Legacy

Hotline Miami is widely seen as one of the most important indie games ever, both in terms of critical praise and sales. Its popularity encouraged many people to start making their own games, which helped fuel a boom in indie releases during the 2010s. Many of those later games borrowed its themes, gameplay, or music. The influence continued for over a decade, showing up in everything from small indie projects to big-budget titles like Naughty Dog's The Last of Us Part II. The soundtrack also had a major impact, making synthwave more popular and boosting the careers of the artists involved. The game helped turn Devolver Digital into a major indie publisher.

The way Hotline Miami handled its story and violence also left a mark on the industry that lasted into the 2020s. In 2019, Cameron Kunzelman wrote that the game's anti-violence message was part of a short-lived trend alongside Spec Ops: The Line. He argued that after Hotline Miami, many games started using violence just to seem serious, without a good reason. He pointed to a trailer for The Last of Us Part II and noted that some of the game's serious dialogue had become memes. He said games needed another change in how they treat violence. In 2024, Chris Tapsell of Eurogamer called Hotline Miami a coming-of-age moment for the industry, a time for self-reflection.

In 2023, TechRadar's Aleksha McLoughlin called it the gold standard for indie games, the best in its sub-genre with no real rival. Nina Corcoran of Pitchfork said Dennaton made it incredibly replayable. In 2022, Lewis Gordon of The Ringer said it pushed the boundaries of the industry. Christopher Cruz of Rolling Stone called it a titan of indie gaming. The game has also built a strong cult following.