Hotline Miami And The Rise Of Techno In UltraViolent Video Games
At the very beginning of the Miami Hotline, you'll find some helpful advice: "Stupidity is rewarded." Little do you know how true this is. The 2012 video game, set in Miami circa 1989, follows an unnamed protagonist who receives coded messages to begin a "kill first, ask questions later" mission. In the first chapter, an innocuous voicemail asking you to act as a last-minute babysitter is actually an order for six mobsters to break into an apartment, and you won't know it's dripping with blood until you're inside. knife in hand. The game is very brutal and unforgiving and frustratingly difficult for many players. It is also considered one of the most influential video games of the last decade.
Perhaps the best part of Hotline Miami is the spooky music that plays as you engage in various crimes. The soundtrack has amassed nearly 15 million streams on YouTube alone, and the general sentiment among fans is best summed up by the leading comment: "It's really cool that this soundtrack is free with the game." Dennaton Games developers Jonathan Cederström and Dennis Wedin knew from the start that Hotline Miami needed a well-crafted soundtrack. "It was very important that the music and the game itself weren't too inspired by video games, because a lot of its inspiration was from movies," Wedin explains to Zoom from his home in Sweden. Mainly inspired by the 2011 film Drive , they emphasized contrasts: modern techno and retro graphics, cute animal masks and aggressive killing techniques, bright neon colors and dark brown blood.
Everything is intense, but that intensity makes it fun, especially when it comes to recording. The playlist includes bass-heavy techno, hazy vapors, and experimental electronic music from Sun Araw, CoConuts, and a few unknown Bandcamp artists. Even the wave of synths that Drive helped bring to life with interludes and chat scenes on Miami's Hotline surfaces. Cederstrom and Wedin spent weeks searching for the perfect score and listened to a total of "about 2,000 songs" before finding the right one. "It's like we made a big mixtape," says Cederstrom.
The game's favorite tracks are taken from MOON, the project of Stéphane Gillard, Portugal by way of Massachusetts. He was only 16 when Söderström and Wedin came across his debut EP and offered to pay him $400 per song. As a high school kid with an EP to his name and no promotion, it was great. "It feels amazing to have this cult classic as my first work," Gillard says of Zoom. "It changed my whole life." A year earlier, he had been hospitalized for clinical depression and had dropped out of school twice. "At that point I was really angry at myself, angry at the world, angry that my small town of normal teenagers had turned into a thousand and there was no way out." So he started making techno. Despite their lack of lyrics, the four tracks, "Paris," "Crystals," "Hydrogen," and "Release," all sound edgy, from pulsating bass to sharp hi-hat blasts and stuttering synths.
This underlying concern made MOON's songs perfect for Hotline Miami . Created primarily in Ableton, mixed with presets and loop breakdowns, his contribution centers around dissonant melodic intervals and heavy bass BPMs that raise the player's heart rate, an essential part of the soundtrack's effectiveness. A song like "Hydrogen" helps keep players focused while spitting pain and desire for revenge. A simple techno loop on hard levels will help you escape the unsettling feeling of smashing someone's skull in with a baseball bat or shooting a guard dog before they attack you. Hotline Miami's soundtrack just doesn't sound great. it's a stylish aesthetic mindset that intentionally helps players drown out the problems around them.
"Instead of engaging you in cognitive activity, techno actually allows you to free yourself from the 'grip of reality,' as one neuroscientist puts it, and let your mind wander without worrying about missing something," he explains. Berkeley. Professor and music psychologist Dr. Susan Rogers. The layered effect of the music on the game itself becomes a delicate balance of repetition, cross-modal perception and synthesis as a unique neural reward of the imagination that drives players away from the engaging game. "In the case of electronic music, it doesn't require cognitive effort," he said. "You don't have to think about it to enjoy it."
Adding to the indie gaming boom of the 2010s, Hotline Miami helped popularize a trend that combined adrenaline-pumping electronic music with dynamic combat, bright color schemes, and stylish kills. In recent years, this combination has appeared in games such as Rollerdrome 2022 in 2019 or Project Downfall . Maybe it's because they're already tied up with Hotline Miami , but video game publisher Devolver Digital is especially keen on high-octane games with this dynamic. Ruiner is a brutal cyberpunk shooter from 2017, while Katana Zero is a 2019 neo-noir about an assassin who must kill enemies and manage time to avoid attacks. Both games boast an icy techno soundtrack recorded on vinyl. Then there's Dostum Pedro , a creative side-scrolling shooter he created in 2019 that went viral thanks to its unique GIF capability. This game's ominous soundtrack sounds like Trent Reznor throwing a Blade party.
Devolver's Robbie Patterson recalls, "All of these games evoked strong emotions, whether it was laughter, excitement, or just random screams." The cross-modal perception found in all these games tends to reward sensory overload; bright colors, fast action, loud music that keeps you awake but focused; This is what creates the brutal games that create different thrills. Patterson plays it down. "Overall, if a game comes out that looks amazing and is fun to play, we're interested."
As anyone with a joystick knows, mixing violence with techno is nothing new. In 1992 , Mortal Kombat set the bar by letting you literally rip your opponent's back off while playing the game's legendary "Techno Syndrome" theme music. The song sparked Pepsi-fueled Sega Genesis marathons in basements across the country and caused such panic among parents that Congress held its first hearings on violence in video games.
If violent games are a way to engage in forbidden activities like fighting without actually harming others, it's their music that keeps players hooked. Video game researcher and clinical psychologist Dr. Anthony Bean acts as a charm to attract music players. immersion – and electronic music, especially subgenres with faster BPMs like techno, are particularly good at this. "This music is meant to be trance-inducing, and when we're playing, visually, tactilely and aurally, you have three of the five [senses] here," he explains. "This symbiotic relationship forces us to be ready when we lose to get back into the rhythm of the game."
In other words, Mortal Kombat killed it so that Hotline could satisfy the Miami Massacre. But what sets Hotline Miami apart from the heavy hitters of yesteryear is how great it still looks and feels years later. When Söderström and Wedin developed it, they did so with one foot in the past and the other in the future, making the game incredibly repetitive. Moreover, none of the games that followed its bloody aftermath topped it.
