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the making of‌ The stories behind some of the best and Most influential Games of all time
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contents
4
PONG
006
NO MORE HEROES
062
STRIDER
010
LEFT 4 DEAD
066
PIPE MANIA
014
THE BEATLES: ROCK BAND
070
FINAL FANTASY VI
018
FLOWER
074
TEKKEN
022
TRIALS HD
078
DIE HARD TRILOGY
026
ALAN WAKE
082
VIB-RIBBON
030
LIMBO
086
MEDAL OF HONOR
034
BATMAN: ARKHAM CITY
090
REZ
038
THE WALKING DEAD
094
KILL SWITCH
042
SLEEPING DOGS
098
KATAMARI DAMACY
046
DISHONORED
102
YAKUZA
050
XCOM: ENEMY UNKNOWN 108
BIOSHOCK
054
HOTLINE MIAMI
112
ASSASSIN’S CREED
058
KENTUCKY ROUTE ZERO
116
YEAR WALK
120
FAR CRY 3: BLOOD DRAGON
124
PAPERS, PLEASE
128
SUPER MARIO 3D WORLD
132
WOLFENSTIEN: THE NEW ORDER
136
UNTIL DAWN
140
DOOM
144
PERSONA 5
148
TITANFALL 2
152
WHAT REMAINS OF EDITH FINCH
156
Tekken
How a one-time Namco research project turned into a PlayStation classic Kazuya Mishima may be front and centre here, and his clan may be the main focus of the story, but Tekken doesn’t have a Ryu-alike star as such
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Developer/publisher Namco Format Arcade, PS1 Origin Japan Release 1994
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atsuhiro Harada took an odd route into development. While reading psychology at Waseda university, he decided he wanted to work with the arcade games he’d spent his youth sneaking out of school to play. He weighed up his options – a studio, an events company, a specialist magazine – but he had no experience and no transferable skills. He saw a vacancy for a sales rep at an arcade, figured a knowledge of the ways of the human brain would be useful, and applied for it. Then for another job and another, firing off CVs to Yoshimitsu, a twirling ninja with a mechanical arm, would become a series fixture, and go on to appear in Soul Calibur every big videogame company of the time. “I applied to Namco, Sega, Capcom, Taito, next 20 or 30 years of games. The creation of Square and many others,” he tells us. But he Tekken was not only about making a new game was busy with student life, and in no mood to – we were also researching the future.” wait. “I was studying; I was busy with my yacht It was a research project with the steepest of racing society. I didn’t think I really wanted a job learning curves. These were problems that simply with Namco, but they were the first company to didn’t exist in 2D games, where realism was a offer me a job. I accepted it.” peripheral concern. When you throw a punch He would go on to break Namco’s record with one arm, your other arm moves as well to for first-year arcade sales, earning him sufficient keep your balance, something kudos to press higher-ups for a “We did almost no games played from a side-on move into game development. view never had to show. And in Over 20 years later, he’s still balancing. Back Street Fighter II, every character there, now overseeing a series then, developers gets hit from the front or the back, that, back in 1994, was just an never from the side. What idea. At that time, Capcom’s just went by how happens when a fighter connects Street Fighter II series ruled the things felt. They with a right hook in a 3D space 2D fighting game genre and at 60 frames per second? “2D Sega had got to market early with did it manually” fighting games are like a flip the polygonal 3D Virtua Fighter. book, every frame designed one by one. They Namco wanted to make the game to beat are like pictures that we watch from a side-on Sega, and was already pulling ahead from view, but the 3D fighting game has space. It its rivals in its understanding of high-poly wasn’t just about the coolness of the animation, technology, but its development staff were but how we could actually make the character still finding their feet in the transition from 2D. hit the opponent. That was the tough part.” Having the tech was one thing; knowing how It was a factor in the decision to eschew to use it to make games was another matter Street Fighter’s fantastical moves and base entirely. The solution was, in a way, obvious. Tekken on more realistic punches and kicks. That “Some staff joined us from Sega who had was a product of the time, too: with the move to worked on Virtua Fighter,” Harada says. “They 3D games, developers and players were leaning were mainly animators, and some programmers. more towards the realistic. “When people saw Then we had a team at Namco that had made 3D, they thought the era of virtual reality had Knuckle Heads, this really boring 2D Namco finally come,” Harada says. “So we thought fighting game, and a planning team too.” They everyone wanted something more realistic. set to work, but they weren’t really making a Polygons look real, with smooth movement, so fighting game at first. “The most important part we thought, ‘Let’s create Chinese kenpo,’ or, of a fighting game is how the characters move. ‘Let’s replicate the real skill of judo.’ It wasn’t like It was an animation experiment. We knew 3D we all thought, ‘Let’s differentiate ourselves from human body movement would be critical for the
Street Fighter.’ It was about recreating something that actually exists in the real world.” Yet even that proved complex. With eight characters in production for the arcade version, each with their own fighting style, the work piled up. There were a couple of hundred animations per character – nothing by modern standards, of course, but it was simply too much for a team moving from sprite-based 2D. Namco started hiring, assigning multiple staff to each character. By the time the project was complete, the team had grown from around 20 to almost 50.
Today, Harada is still coy about the designs of the characters themselves – no surprise given how many of them seem to be based on stars from other media. He admits Paul, the hardhitting biker with the impossibly tall blond flattop, was inspired by a character of the same name in the manga JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Masamichi Abe, now at Nintendo but back then a member of the Tekken planning team, was a fan. Others were more obvious; Harada has never publicly admitted the inspiration for barechested kung fu fighter Marshall Law, though there’s a subtle admission of Bruce Lee’s influence to be found on Law’s alternate costume. On the back, the number three is written in blue. Blue Three: Bruce Lee. Harada regrets this approach, since different people drawing inspiration from different places meant there was no consistent style across the cast. “I’d redo the character designs,” Harada says when we ask what he’d change in retrospect. “They may have been unique, but they didn’t really have any meaning. In Virtua Fighter, costumes were always the same, so people would see a character and know who they were immediately. Street Fighter was the same. Tekken was a bit half-hearted in that area. Look at Michelle: she’s just wearing a white shirt and black trousers, but in [her alternate costume] she looks like a Native American. There was no concept there. It lacks consistency.” The final game lacked balance, too. “We did almost no balancing,” Harada says. “Back then, developers just went by how things felt. They did it manually, not with a calculator. It was only around the middle of development on Tekken 2 that we starting using numerical conversion and calculation.” There were 23
Medal Of Honor DreamWorks’ WWII FPS was almost killed before it cleared the beach. Here’s how it survived
Artist Matt Hall’s character art was inspired by Saving Private Ryan: “We wanted the main character to be this quintessential everyman, which is what the heroes in Spielberg’s movies always were”
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Developer DreamWorks Interactive Publisher EA Format PlayStation Origin US Release 1999
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t’s November 1999 and the atmosphere in Steven Spielberg’s office is frosty. The director’s Amblin production company, on the Universal Studios lot, is hosting Paul Bucha, the president of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society. The Vietnam veteran, awarded America’s highest decoration for his own courage under fire, is stating his case against videogames. Strongly. The particular target of his ire: a firstperson shooter based on an original concept by Spielberg himself called Medal Of Honor. Art director Matt Hall (left) worked on 2010’s MOH reboot, Spielberg, whose company DreamWorks while writer and producer Peter Hirschmann (right) went Interactive developed the title, looks absolutely on to work on Star Wars: The Force Unleashed at LucasArts gutted. Medal Of Honor was his passion project, after all, designed to give kids genuine insight entertainment earlier than anyone else in into the history behind WWII. As a proud Hollywood. Over the years he’d exerted a largely American, the filmmaker is left heartbroken by unacknowledged influence over the medium’s Bucha’s verbal tirade. early evolution, working as an unofficial consultant “It was an intense meeting,” recalls Medal at both Atari and LucasArts. At DreamWorks Of Honor writer and producer Peter Hirschmann. Interactive (DWI), he finally had a chance to get “Paul came in and laid it out on the table. We some skin in the game personally. just sat there and let him speak. He didn’t know It wasn’t a vanity play; more a sign of how anything about the game but laid out a case: much he loved videogames. “I think he was ‘When it comes to the Medal of Honor, it’s a inspired by the invention and toy-like sense of serious and sacred thing; you don’t turn it into creation and engagement that overtook people in a videogame. It’s an awful thing to do.’ He the games business,” explains Medal Of Honor’s made a really compelling case executive producer, Patrick “We couldn’t that we shouldn’t be doing this.” Gilmore. “He thought games could At the end of the meeting, unlock new ways to tell stories.” even show day,” Medal Of Honor appears to The story behind Medal Of laughs art director Honor began, appropriately be done for. Even though it’s just reached the “release to enough, on the 11th day of the Matt Hall, “so manufacturing” stage – and 11th month of 1997. Spielberg, every level is a DreamWorks has invested millions at the time deep in post-production in its development and production on Saving Private Ryan, outlined night mission!” – Spielberg is seriously thinking his idea for a game to DWI’s about cutting his losses. Bucha’s blitzkrieg team. His R-rated movie was too bloody for kids seems to have landed a fatal broadside. but, inspired by his teenage son Max’s love of Hirschmann respectfully counters with a question: GoldenEye, the director wanted to share his has the decorated war veteran got time for a deeply ingrained interest in WWII with younger quick play? audiences via videogames. Addressing the team, he sketched out an When DreamWorks set up shop in 1995, ambitious concept: a firstperson shooter for Sony’s PlayStation, set in the European theatre of war ‘interactive’ was Hollywood’s favourite buzzword. Every major studio, from Paramount to Universal to and named after America’s highest military award, the Medal of Honor. Orders given, Spielberg Disney, had a newly minted interactive division, closed the meeting with that boyish grin of his and DreamWorks was no exception. Its software and a parting shot: “I’ll be back in a week.” segment – staffed by ex-Microsoft employees At the time, there was little enthusiasm for the who’d been lured from Redmond to Hollywood project among DWI’s corporate management. by the glamour and flip-flop weather – focused on Console games weren’t DWI’s main focus, and developing PC titles. Yet unlike other movie-studio the PlayStation market wasn’t big on the FPS software divisions, DreamWorks Interactive held genre. In addition, World War II was generally a trump card: Steven Spielberg. considered a passé theme at that point. “People The bearded director and DreamWorks were really dubious,” Hirschmann recalls. co-founder recognised the appeal of interactive
“They said, ‘World War II is old, it’s got cobwebs on it. People want ray guns, hellspawn and laser rifles.’ The idea of doing something with historical relevance set in a low-tech game environment was a challenging sell.” While their peers worked on the much-touted Small Soldiers game, Hirschmann’s team – “a ragtag group of misfits, very much the underdog institutionally” – spent the next seven days putting together a demo using the engine from their previous project, PlayStation game Jurassic Park: The Lost World. “It was a crazy week. We took that renderer and put together a demo with bailing wire and chewing gum,” the producer laughs, still amused by the white-knuckle ride that Spielberg set in motion. The demo proved the concept: shooting Nazis was extremely satisfying.
For Steven Spielberg, Medal Of Honor was no ordinary licensed movie title, and it shared none of Saving Private Ryan’s plot. As a companion piece, though, it shared the film’s reverential tone. Early in development, Spielberg told Hirschmann to call up Captain Dale Dye, the retired US Marine officer turned Hollywood military advisor who’d worked with him on Ryan. “I was like: ‘Oh, no, he’s gonna think we’re a bunch of pencil-necked geeks who don’t know what the hell is going on’,” Hirschmann remembers. “It turns out he thought we were a bunch of pencil-necked geeks who didn’t know what the hell was going on. The last thing he wanted to do was babysit us. It was like, ‘Oh, shit’ – on both sides.” Dye arrived at DWI’s offices in fearsome drill instructor mode, convinced the studio was making, in Hirschmann’s words, “an exploitative, tonedeaf, irresponsible thing”. Once he saw their intentions were honourable, his mood softened. He became a valuable ally to the team, running them through an impromptu boot camp, calling them out on their military inaccuracies and lending his distinctive, authoritative voice to the game’s opening narration. The training paid off, bolstering the game’s sense of historical authenticity. Not just a shoot ’em up, it offers miniature history lessons while you play, offering background on everything from the OSS to the Gestapo to V2 rockets while nostalgic art and video clips convey a sense of the period. The original Medal Of Honor remains arguably the most educational FPS ever made. With the game in development so early in the life of Sony’s console – the DualShock 35
BioShock
Chaos, a literary classic, and insane ambition came together to create an iconic underwater shooter
The Big Daddy, designed by art director Nate Wells, became BioShock’s iconic monster. Of its appearance Levine says, “Nate loves engineering design and the look of things that are designed to be functional”
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Developer Irrational Games Publisher 2K Games Format 360, PC, PS3 Origin US Release 2007
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en Levine has had better nights. It’s February 2007, and the creative director and co-founder of Irrational Games is standing behind a one-way mirror in an office in downtown Boston. He’s watching a bunch of people play an early build of his latest game, BioShock. It’s depressing. The crowd on the other side of the glass is jeering. They don’t just dislike the game, they’re viciously mocking it: ‘Who’s that Australian idiot talking in your ear? Why are these zombies wandering about this place? Why are those As well as overseeing character design, Nate Wells, a System robots flying at us? It’s all really stupid.’ Shock 2 veteran, helped bring Rapture’s architecture to life “It was pretty depressing,” Levine recalls. Not that it was straightforward. Although “The guy who managed the focus group came BioShock has one of the strongest creative visions up to us afterwards. It was like the doctor telling in gaming, its genesis was pretty chaotic. It took a you you’ve got two weeks to live. He was couple of years for basic ideas to coalesce, and saying, ‘Yep, you guys are kind of fucked.’” a few more for the game to start taking shape as For Levine, it was the worst possible news. this side project morphed into the company’s next Everyone knew that BioShock didn’t tick the usual big thing. “At Irrational, we tend to work in an boxes. It was a firstperson shooter where political evolutionary process,” Levine explains, “which is philosophy flew as freely as bullets, and its world, a polite way of saying we take a long time to a submerged art-deco city, was unlike anything figure out what the hell we’re doing.” seen before in videogames. No one expected BioShock’s art director, Nate Wells, compares audiences to gel with it right away, but neither the company’s approach to development to an did they expect the game to be laughed at. artist sketching: “If you watch a really good artist As he listened to the feedback, Levine put pencil to page to draw a curve, he will take wondered if he’d made a mistake. He’d led his pencil and strike it to the page Irrational in pursuit of this shooter/ “It was like the 12, 15 times before he finds the RPG hybrid. He’d even sold the curve. He doesn’t put his pencil company he co-founded to Takedoctor telling you down and draw the exact curve Two and 2K Games to help you’ve got weeks he wants. He sculpts, then selects finance his vision. All for what? one of those lines to darken. That’s An outsider looking in at that to live. He was what we do on every front: the point might have concluded that saying, ‘Yep, you visuals of the game, the design of BioShock was a monumental act of hubris on a par with the game’s guys are fucked’” the game. We’re always sketching until we see, from that chaotic own underwater city, Rapture, built process, the right ideas emerge.” by megalomaniac Andrew Ryan. But despite the By 2002, Irrational’s pencil had barely struck jeers, Levine’s vision was no folly. And unlike the paper. All the team had to show for its efforts Rapture, crushed under the weight of its ambition, was a very basic concept, a game system with BioShock was destined to swim, not sink. three groups: protectors, harvesters and drones The story of BioShock began just over seven carrying a valuable resource. Eventually, these years before that terrible focus group. Irrational would become the game’s Big Daddies, splicers Games had released System Shock 2 in late and Little Sisters. Back in the early 2000s, though, 1999, a critically acclaimed PC horror-FPS that the game was very different to how it would proved the developer’s credentials, but met with eventually end up. poor sales. Despite sporting a bruised ego, the Early pitches set the core game system against Boston developer picked itself up and worked on the backdrop of an abandoned Nazi genetics lab Freedom Force and Tribes: Vengeance during the or in a sci-fi environment. But they weren’t exciting early 2000s. Yet it kept returning to the idea of enough to grab publishers’ attention. Codemasters making a spiritual successor to the Shock series. passed on it, as did Atari and EA. Even when 2K, It was an itch its staff just had to scratch.
part of Take-Two, signed the project in 2004, the game was a shadow of what it would become. “It was not Rapture,” Levine remembers of the internally financed demo that snagged 2K’s funding. “Andrew Ryan didn’t exist. The Big Daddies and Little Sisters as you know them didn’t exist. It was just this idea about games systems. Take-Two bought it on that basis, I’m not exactly sure why they did at the time. I think it showed a lot of vision on their part.” With 2K’s help, BioShock would evolve from a low-budget RPG-heavy title made by a team of 30 to an RPG/FPS hybrid built by a core team of 90, and with access to the kind of funding that would catapult it into the realm of $15 million games. As part of that process, Irrational would be bought out, becoming 2K Boston and 2K Australia (although Boston would later revert to the Irrational name, while the Australian division would close in 2015). But before anyone could justify that kind of budget, BioShock’s designers needed to decide what the game was going to be.
Levine was standing under the shadow of the GE Building at the heart of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, Manhattan, when it hit him. Walking around the towering, 70-story edifice, with its artdeco design and famous statue of Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders, he began to think about replicating its ornate style. It wouldn’t be the kind of world FPS games normally allowed players to explore. In that moment, Rapture was born. Building Rapture’s detailed world was a joy, not least for the art team, but it was something that was only possible thanks to Take-Two cash. “I think where the money really showed in BioShock was the bandwidth it gave the artists to build and really realise the visual look of the game,” Levine says. “We’d never had the resources before to really establish an aesthetic as carefully as we did in that game. A lot of that was about having the time and resources to hire the people to develop the look and develop the assets.” That trip to the Rockefeller Center also fed into BioShock’s story. The plaza was first planned in the 1920s, but the Metropolitan Opera pulled out when the stock market tanked and the Great Depression hit, leaving John Rockefeller holding the baby. Taking out a $65 million loan, the oil tycoon finished the project solo. A great man building an architectural triumph against all the odds: you don’t have to ponder that for long to see the link to BioShock’s chief 55
The Beatles: Rock Band
From small beginnings to an Abbey Road swan song: how Harmonix helped The Beatles conquer the world a second time Capturing The Beatles’ likenesses was one of the game’s key achievements, and it required feedback from those close to the band, including Yoko Ono
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Developer Harmonix Publisher MTV Games Format 360, PS3, Wii Origin US Release 2009
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es, he’d just taken the phone call he’d been waiting for, but now Josh Randall was worried. Since his earliest days at Harmonix, working first on Karaoke Revolution and then Guitar Hero, he’d pushed the idea of a game based on a single, wellknown band. Now it was happening, and the band in question was about as big as they get. “We’d been doing experiments with games based around specific groups for a number of years, even before Guitar Hero,” Randall tells us. “And I was involved in a series of those prototypes. Me and the other guys would joke, like, ‘Wouldn’t it be awesome to do a Beatles game? Ha ha. Yeah, as if.’ “But then, I guess in around 2006 or early 2007, I got called up by Harmonix and they said, ‘Hey, we’re finally going to do one of those band games. And it’s The Beatles.’ I’d been creative director on Amplitude, Guitar Hero and the first Rock Band, but I really had to take a weekend to think about this one.”
George Harrison’s son, Dhani, was instrumental in brokering meetings with Apple Corps’ shareholders, eventually helping Harmonix secure rights to The Beatles’ music and assets
outfits would look like, the characters, things like that, and we made a basic noninteractive sequence to demonstrate how we could model and move the guys. The Apple Corps guys liked it and we were able to move on from there.” Getting the mechanics together was relatively simple, since everything in the original Rock Band could be lifted pretty much wholesale into the Beatles project. Instead it was obtaining music licences “I was about and the blessings of Apple Randall’s nerves were Corps stakeholders, such as understandable: this project came to push it up to McCartney and Starr, that straight from the top. Harmonix occupied a lot of early was then owned by MTV, and Van medium when Toffler, the network president, had Ringo Starr called development time. Lead designer Chris Foster wanted been hanging out with Dhani from the back to to base the game around the Harrison, the only child of Beatles various milestones in The Beatles’ guitarist George. The two were do it on expert” career, the plan being to include having lunch when Dhani photographs, videos and historical essays that explained he was a big fan of Guitar Hero. He would detail the lives and music of the band. just wished it had a microphone and a drum kit. However, that material proved hard to secure. “We’d just started working on the first Rock “I was working with Helen McWilliams, Band,” Randall says, “so Toffler asked Dhani to our lead writer, and Brett Milano, the journalist come meet the team and sit down with our who was doing the original drafts of the essays, cofounder and then-CEO, Alex Rigopulos. He editing them and sending them to Apple Corps asked Dhani if The Beatles would ever want to for approval,” Foster says. “That process took a do a game, and Dhani reckoned yes, so from very long time. The surviving Beatles wanted it that we started arranging a bunch of meetings all to be accurate, true to what they remembered with the folks at Apple Corps.” from the time, and there was a lot of effort in Randall, who’d now signed on as creative assuring [them] we could handle that.” director, became Harmonix’s point man. “I was Foster had come onto the project in 2008, flying back and forth to Abbey Road Studios for after finishing work on Phase. Like Randall, his months, meeting with Paul McCartney, Ringo early months on The Beatles: Rock Band were Starr, Yoko Ono, Olivia Harrison and George spent flying from Harmonix’s HQ in Cambridge, Martin’s son, Giles, who was producing the Massachusetts, to Abbey Road, London. game on the Apple Corps side. It was a very “Between having the idea to do these essays long approvals process. We’d send packages and get these pictures and actually having them every few months with concepts for what the
completed took about six months,” Foster says. “We were trying to do right by the band, but there’s a lot of writing out there on The Beatles and it’s easy, when you’re doing rock journalism, to embellish. We ended up compiling this thick binder full of information from various Beatles anthologies, and I took it to Abbey Road and just sat with Paul McCartney for about two hours, tapping down on a controller so I could scroll through the essays we had in-game and he could read them out loud. If they were OK, he’d just say, ‘Yep,’ and we’d move on. If not, he’d ask about our sources and where we’d heard this stuff, and then maybe try to clarify things. “He was very generous. If there was something we’d mentioned about an album cover, he’d make sure we credited all the people who helped design it. Plus, it wasn’t like it always had to be his way. Sometimes he’d ask, ‘Did we really do that?’ and I’d quote our sources and he’d be OK with it.” Randall had similar experiences. After seeing the original design for George Harrison’s avatar, Olivia Harrison invited him over to drink tea and go through some old photo albums, just to make sure the likeness would be exactly right. He was also managing the playlist. The Harmonix team had decided which tracks it wanted to use, but getting them out of Abbey Road proved tricky. “The song selection came together really quickly,” Randall says. “We put together a spreadsheet of our personal favourites, then listened back to them all. Some had too much piano; some were maybe a little slow and wouldn’t be as compelling to play. But that’s how we distilled it down to a shortlist. We ran our selections past Giles – we had just one meeting where he pointed out which of the tracks would play well – and then we got to work. “But there was a ton of security around transferring assets. We would fly over and they would give us a hard drive, but the files on there were encrypted. If you listened to them raw, they’d sound like garbage. That meant a lot of decryption and optimisation work on our end.” “Preparing songs for The Beatles: Rock Band meant going back to the original recording sessions, recreating each song’s original mix and bouncing them out into separate audio files for each instrument,” says audio director Eric Brosius. “That created separated ‘stems’,
71
Hotline Miami How a Swedish top-down murder simulator turned the debate about videogame violence upside down
Hotline Miami ’s cover art was upfront about the ’80s exploitation vibe. But the shocking thing was how the game itself challenged our acceptance of videogame violence
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Developer Dennaton Games Publisher Devolver Digital Format PC Origin Sweden Release 2012
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Some people make games. Some people otline Miami – a deliriously violent craft games. Some people churn out games like a videogame that stood out in a year full one-man production facility. Ever since he started of assassins, exotic ways to cause harm releasing freeware games in 2004, Söderström and elaborate gunplay – asks players a has fallen into the latter category, firing out new searching question: do you like hurting people? titles at the rate of M60 ammo rounds. And Heads are crushed with bats, throats are slit with inspired by everyone from Japanese developer kitchen knives, and machine-gun bullets cause Ikiki to novelists such as William Burroughs, his arterial rain to spatter across living-room carpets output has often been avant-garde. and ramshackle tenement stairwells. Sometimes Super Carnage was a game he started a dying bad guy will crawl around on his hands working on back in 2004 when he was 18: and knees, blindly bumping into the walls for a a top-down shoot ’em up in which the aim was while. And you may not even care enough to simply to kill as many people as possible. It was put him out of his misery. a teenage boy’s game: sick and violent, and At the end of each mission, you walk back to little more than that. After struggling with the AI’s your car, retracing your bloody footsteps through pathfinding, though, Söderström filed the game the building you’ve just painted red. As you pass in the ‘unfinished and unreleased’ box and went each mangled corpse, you’re forced to witness to work on other things. the carnage that you’re responsible for. It’s grim, It might have stayed unfinished if Söderström disturbing and not a little nauseating (even the hadn’t met Dennis Wedin, singer and keyboard silent protagonist, dubbed ‘The Jacket’ by fans, player in metalcore band Fucking Werewolf Asso. pukes after the first mission). So the question, as They collaborated on a promo game based on posed in surreal cutscenes by the game’s animalthe band (a psychedelic, punk 8bit outing named masked puppet masters, lingers: do you like Keyboard Drumset Fucking Werewolf) and an hurting other people? And if you don’t, why unfinished game called Life/Death/Island that are you still playing? grew too big for them to handle. Hotline Miami is provocative in its attempt Running out of money and with bills to pay, to question our attitudes to simulated mass murder. they decided the next game would be their first Yet despite being released just before the Sandy commercial release. Flicking through Söderström’s Hook Elementary School shootings, it managed collection of unfinished prototypes, to avoid being dragged into “We wanted to Wedin came across Super tabloid outrage over videogame Carnage and instantly saw its violence. Instead, its impact was show that we potential. They’d spend the next confined to the people who play games and the videogame industry were self-conscious nine months holed up in Wedin’s apartment creating what would itself. Which is pretty much how about the kind become Hotline Miami. two-man Swedish developer of game we “It was fucking hard,” recalls Dennaton planned it. Wedin of going into development “We wanted it to be disturbing were making” with no budget and no clear idea and we wanted people to feel the of how they’d even sell the finished product. violence,” says graphic artist Dennis Wedin. “Some days we were so fucking tired, and we “But we weren’t afraid about it being didn’t know if we were going to earn anything controversial, because it’s pixel art. If we’d made from this game or if anyone was even going to it in 3D and very realistic then it might have been play it. But we always loved playing it. As soon different. But the graphics keep the game out of as I made some graphics, and we put them in, the spotlight. At Gamescom, they had to rate all and tried it out, it felt so good... and all the the games, so two people came over and played motivation was back.” it. And they gave it a 12, I think, because the While the core gameplay of Hotline Miami graphics are so colourful.” owed much to Super Carnage, there was a big His partner, well-known freeware developer change. Before they started development, Jonatan Söderström (AKA Cactus), agrees: “We wanted to show that we were self-conscious about Söderström and Wedin hung out watching movies for inspiration. Among them were vigilante the kind of game we were making.” How ironic, superhero adventure Kick-Ass, Miami-set drugs then, that Hotline Miami began as the most documentary Cocaine Cowboys and Drive, violent, least self-conscious game imaginable.
Nicolas Winding Refn’s neon-tinged, bubblegumpop-scored thriller about a Hollywood stuntman who gets caught up in a heist gone wrong. Raising questions about screen violence, Drive was a movie with smarts. It got Söderström and Wedin thinking: what if a videogame could do something similar? What if Super Carnage wasn’t merely a game in which you killed people, but a game that posed questions about what it meant to kill people in a game? Layering on a surreal narrative full of flashbacks and cutscenes featuring men in animal masks, Hotline Miami turned its violent game design into something more than the sum of its parts. “Me, I’m into games that are just games,” Wedin explains. “But Jonatan thinks a lot about how he wants the player to think about the game. He believes the game should leave something with the player when they stop playing.”
Like all Söderström’s previous releases, Hotline Miami was put together with GameMaker, YoYo Games’ development toolkit. “One of the reasons I didn’t move on from GameMaker is that there are very few tools that allow you to make games as fast,” he explains. “It’s very easy to use and you can code pretty sloppily in it. It gives you a lot of pre-built-in functions and tools that you’d have to invest a lot of time in making yourself if you used another engine.” There is a downside to the flexibility and speed that GameMaker offers, though. “It’s a lot slower than most other engines, where you can use the hardware a lot more efficiently. And you can’t do whatever you want, because you are limited to what GameMaker was designed for, which is mostly 2D games. It doesn’t have support for shaders or stuff like that – at least not in the version [used for Hotline Miami].” Using an older version of the software threw up other issues that didn’t become apparent until after Hotline Miami’s release, such as the troublesome fact that certain printers would stop the game from running correctly. “A lot of strange things happened after we released the game. I guess most of it has been fixed in the new version of GameMaker. But we’re still using the old version that wasn’t really built for the newer operating systems.” For the dev team, though, the biggest challenge was creating the enemy AI. Hotline Miami is a game that requires you to kill or be killed. Its fast-paced instadeath design demands that its enemies are worthy adversaries. There
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