[Atmospheric Music] When we designed the levels, we wanted it to feel like challenging. Which it shouldn't be, it should be quite easy for us to finish the game. We have seen some pre-like videos recently who has like almost made a 180° on Hotline Miami 2. That's kind of fun to see like, maybe appreciate it a bit more. Seeing it for what it is. A misunderstood game. [VHS tape Loading, Rewinding, and Bright Music] I really hate to say this but Hotline Miami turns 10 this year. So, with that in mind it's probably a good time to take a look at the development of the series. A retrospective if you will, or perhaps a post-mortem. We'll get to that later. Jonatan Söderström and Dennis Wedin, the two halves of Dennaton games, are currently working on their first new game since 2015's sequel to Hotline Miami. Recently, we all jumped on a call to talk about the story of its development. Everything from their collaboration process to design decisions, picking the soundtrack how the first game came together, their dreams for the sequel, and it's turbulent reception. There's a lot here so let's get to the beginning. First things first, how did an indie dev in Sweden and his musician friend decide to start making games together? And how on earth did their first commercial game go on to be a global hit? [Electronic Music] So, I'm from a very small town. So, there wasn't much to do. We had like a big scene of hardcore music. Straight-edge was kind of big in Sweden back in the 90s, with Refused. So, I was part of that scene. Played some music, mostly I was hanging out with friends at home at home playing video games. I mean growing up it was all things from USA, like wrestling, and turtles, and transformers.. And I listened to English voices and all that before I even knew the language. We don't do any dubbing or anything here. Creativity for me was just like a hobby. Until I met Jonathan. I was going like educating to be a kindergarten teacher, and I worked in the kindergarten for a long time before I started doing the education. So, for me everything like band-wise, or drawing, or all of that, was just for fun. At that time I was just trying different ideas. Making games, I made like maybe 50 games before we made Hotline Miami. I was throwing them up online and they got a lot of hype. A lot of years before Hotline Miami I was doing interviews and stuff about the games. That's how I learned about Jonathan. I read it in a Swedish video game magazine. They did a lot of like coverage of indie devs and Jonathan was one of them that they did multiple times. There wasn't really any money in it. I made a game that got nominated for an IGF award and after that I got like a patron who gave me $1000 a month for 2 years and that was real nice. Otherwise I probably would have probably quit making games. It was just a creative hobby from the start. A.nd there as never a plan to make money off of games. It just sort of happened. I knew that Jonathan was making games, a bunch of them, and I played a lot of them. So, I had like a small idea for a music video game for my band. So, I asked him if he wanted to do it with me, and Jonathan told me that he can do it but I had to do the graphics. Because he didn't want to do everything on his own. That's how we started, that was like the first time I did pixel art. So, Jonathan thought me the basics and yea that was the first things we did. [Electronic Music] Dennis Wedin moved from Sweden's East coast to Gothenburg and it was here that he was introduced to Jonatan Söderström. Jonathan, who also went by the handle 'Cactus' was a well-known figure in Sweden's indie gamedev scene. While Dennis was a singer and keyboard player in synth-punk band 'Fucking Werewolf Asso'. Dennis collaborated with Jonathan on an interactive music video for his band. They worked well as a team and decided to try something bigger. Their next project, 'Life/Death/Island' was perhaps a little bit too large in scope and never saw the light of day. But the boys enjoyed collaborating and decided to try and work on another game. Dennis ruffled through dozens of prototypes that Jonathan had worked on over the years and came across a top-down shooter that Jonathan had scraped because of issues with enemy pathfinding. Its name - was 'Super Carnage'. Was just looking through a bunch of Jonathan unfinished games. And I was really into 'Gauntlet' and 'Loaded'. 'Chaos Engine' like all those old top-down games so when Jonathan showed me this game, this would be fun to make. I did the basic graphics over a weekend when my parents was visiting. Just like the main character and the enemy, and then we took it from there. It was just supposed to be a small arcade game and then Vlambeer who worked with Devolver got the hands on the demo and they showed it to Devolver. They contacted us and asked if we could make it into a bigger game. [Danny speaking] Wow, that's wild, they actually pitched you on it, was there any hesitation? There was a bunch of hesitation because it was a publisher. So, you know its a scary thing. At that point all you knew was like publishers in movies and music, they tend to like take your IP or the things that you create and then they own it. Yes, but we did mostly talk to Nigel in the beginning. And he was like very straightforward like 'you own everything, we just wanna publish cool games and get them out there' So, that felt like they kind of do the same thing that we're doing but on the publishing side of it so that was kind of cool. [Electronic Music] When Hotline Miami was first released in October of 2012, it was all PC gamers were talking about. The game is spread across a collection of self-contained levels, where you are tasked with murdering everyone in a building while wearing a selection of masks with different perks. It evoked memories of classic top-down games but with far more punishing enemies which forced players to either plan ahead or gleefully throw caution to the wind. Equally as important though was that it was just fucking cool. The colorful high-contrast color palette and in-your-face soundtrack, created a game that was just fun to be in. Even as you died over, and over, and over again. But asking Jonathan and Dennis to explain their design process is tricky because of the nature of their collaboration. Jonathan codes the games, Dennis does the art, but the design responsibilities they share come from an organic, unstructured form of teamwork, almost like band members writing a song in a jam session. Before they knew it Hotline Miami was here. [Electronic Music] I mean, one of the main things that we have like a designer philosophy or whatever you are going to call it, is like that we are making a game that we want to play. and not think too much about consumers or like how will other people read this. So, that makes it very easy because if it's not fun for us or the idea doesn't feel like a interesting idea for our game, that is something we would like to play, then it doesn't fit. I mean we talk a lot about ideas and stuff but it's not like we iterate on ideas that much. Either it fits, or it doesn't, and usually it fits. Like, I don't have had to scrap basically anything we have put into the game. Yea, maybe more like tweaking. But not like this doesn't work, I don't think that happened It's hard to say who did what in like the broad space, like remembering like who's idea it was but yea. For example, dialogue is all on Jonathan maybe discussing the broad idea what they're going to talk about but everything was like almost like it was one entity doing all of it. [Electronic Music, Guns Firing, Necks Snapping] The game has always been like an arcade game first and then a reality simulator second. So, we was more like making sure that people could build combos and have fun with it. So, it didn't make sense that the enemies would run away from you, 'cause you need to try and trick them, so you have like kill another one within the window of the combo. I don't think we ever wanted to do like realistic behavior. There was only one way to do it in GameMaker and it didn't always behave the way your wanted it to. The enemies would just go too close to the wall, so it looks like they are almost inside the walls, when they are walking next to them and stuff like that. So, you had to figure out how to make the grid for the pathfinding perfect. I think throwing the weapons might have been a bug at first. When you were picking up a new weapon, you had to discard the other weapon. And I think I forgot to make the weapon stop so it just flew away. And it seemed like a cool idea to be able to throw the weapon at the enemies. So, I did mostly like the interior and all the characters. So, Jonathan did all the tiles. All the symmetric stuff because I'm not very good at that. I meant, everything came very fluently Everything just came very natural, it was very simple to make it fit with Jonathan's style of programming and tiles and all that. The game is actually quite minimalistic in a way. It's just that there's a lot of patterns on floors and stuff that makes it look busy. So, there's not really a lot of objects in a level, at least not in the first game. Hiding the emptiness with busy tiles is pretty much what worked for the game. I think we also tend to use, make sure that we use different colours for tiles and characters so it doesn't merge together. I think that's one of the tricks that we use a lot. The main goal for me was to make a game that felt sort of like it was geared more towards adults, or at least people my age. Inspire people to try and figure out whats actually on. So, it had to be mysterious. Also, we didn't want to encourage anyone to commit any real acts of violence so we had to add that element to the story. But it was like important, I felt like, with the story and I remember we talked about this quite early that we didn't want it to be in the way for people who just want the game to be like an arcade game. So, you could play the whole game and not have to click through a bunch of dialogue and watch a bunch of cut scenes. [Automatic Gunfire and Electronic Music] I remember that after I did the graphics that weekend my parents were visiting Jonathan had like a week where he put it all together, like the basics of it. I remember that you added some music that you had on your computer, just like random stuff that you listened to. And I think that was like the first, I don't really remember how. Did you just put it in there for fun or did you have a plan with that? No, I just put it in for fun. So, that had a really cool vibe because that music was very repetitive in a sense and almost like hypnotizing. So, then we started looking for similar music And I remember Jonathan was like on Bandcamp a lot, just browsing and just showing me stuff. Like, maybe this, and if it was cool we bought the soundtrack, and put it in and just played with it for a while. We didn't want the music to be stressful, we wanted it to be more hypnotic, not the highest tempo. I sent out emails asking if they would be interested. And explained our position, we didn't know how much money we could afford to pay them. If they said yes, I sent them on to Devolver and they sorted out the paperwork. [Ambient Electro] I think at the end of development when we did bikers' level, I remember we tried to find some songs that fitted that level. For the arcade for example it would be cool to have like more chiptuney-vibe to the song. We had some issues releasing the game, that was kind of a pain. Because GameMaker had some weird assets that we didn't know of. So, I think that was very problematic to fix. Some people, couldn't get it to work, the game to run, the reason was because they had a printer connected to the computer. And like trying to figure that stuff out was a pain in the ass I remember. The release was quite stressful but before tha we weren't too stressed. I don't remember us being to stressed at least Like the release of the first game was quite fun 'cause at that time the Steam treads were really cool places to hang out, people were really excited for the game. And they were like discussing the story, they were doing all the stuff we were hoping they would do. Like trying to figure out the story, and then you can like sit down and read and you can give them a small nudge to think about something and then they keep on like discussing it, it was quite fun. We were super happy with the game, we loved playing that game, we played it a lot. And even at the end of development when we had been playing it for 6 months, 8 months, whatever it took. It was still fun to play, it was like we did it we did a game that we wanted to play that no-one else has done for us. So, I felt like excitement to just finish it, and then just seeing everyone, a lot of people liking it was really cool. We did something just for us and other people liked it so maybe we have something good here, just keep on doing what we're doing. So, it was not like trying to change anything in how we did the video games or discussing maybe we should add more people. It was more like this is a good thing we've got here, just keep on going. The Hotline Miami games are some of the few games I reviewed during my time at Gamespot and while I love the first game, I adored the sequel. Fans on the other hand, were divided. There's no denying Hotline Miami 2 is harder, something we'll talk to the team about later. But it was also a lot more restrictive in the way it let you approach levels. A by-product of a more involved story, which limited the number of masks available. Ever since, players have different about whether or not that restriction was something good or something they found frustrating So, lets start at the beginning, how did they first approach the difficult second album? [Electronic Music] Well it started out at as a plan to make a DLC for the first game. But pretty soon we decided to do everything from scratch because it felt weird adding stuff to the GameMaker project. I could do a much better job at the programming and have it less messy if we started from the beginning. And then it became a sequel instead of a DLC. I also felt like I wanted to redo the graphics a bit. I mean, it's all based on the same sprites but change the colors a bit, give it a different tone so it also felt like it was weird working with the same sprites. It was quite nice that we didn't have to worry about money. So, we could spend a lot more time making a more complicated game. Like there's a lot more cut scenes, and a lot more story-oriented than the first game. I think if we wouldn't have added a more complex story then it would have felt a lot like making the first game again. I guess the story part became more fun to work on since there wasn't that much new gameplay-wise that we could figure out that would make sense in the game, so that's why it became a big focus. Yea, I remember being very excited about all the characters that we came up and all the story elements that was like the main focus, and also like bringing back some ideas that we had for the first game that we didn't talk that much about. We had all this back-story in the first game but we didn't tell it. Just trying to do something different, expecially with like the whole Tarentino-ish thing of like jumping back and forth in time and through different characters. I remember that being likw really cool and trying to figure out the flow of the levels and the story. [Continuous Punching] It's a quite funny story about the whole like masks giving you different play styles for the first game. Because in the beginning it was just meant to be cosmetics. And then Nigel told someone in an interview, I don't remember which one it was, but he told someone in an interview that the masks also comes with different perks which was not the truth. So, that was kind of like ok we have to add a bunch of perks to all these masks and we just tended to add like more guns doing like the maybe the obvious things. Because I remember for the second game we wanted to do that right, in a sense, because some of them was kind of like not good, and like Tony the Tiger was way too overpowered. And I remember we had like any idea for him like well just remove his ability to like carry weapons. And that could be a cool idea, so that was really fun to really think about all these like different gameplay ideas for the characters. And I feel like we nailed, because as you said it makes you, it forces the player to do different things, and we also wanted to bring in the guns a bit more because in the first game we liked melee was the fun part mostly for most levels, but for this one we wanted to make more gun-oriented levels like bigger levels, and that was one of the more interesting things working on, I remember. [Gun Shot, Brakes Screech] At some point when we were making the first game, we were thinking about doing multiplayer, I think for the briefest period of time. But I think that just carried over to the second game it would be cool to have 2 characters at the same time. I mean, I think Jonathan had the idea to have two character, and then I came up with maybe they should have swan masks because according to legend, and I don't know if its true, but when swans meet they tend to stick together for life like. So, that was kind of a cool idea. And I also like when you had like the fans, you just have the four of them, you can like tailor the level a bit to just them. And you don't have to worry about all of the masks should work. So, for example with the bear masks you can have some corridors that works for him, that was quite fun. [Electronic Music and and Automatic Gunfire] After the launch of the second game then, what did that feel like? Because the first game you're an unknown, crazy, there's no expectation any of that shit, you know with a sequel obviously you've got, you know, I can't imagine how many people played it but they're all going to have their own version of what they think the sequel should be. So, what was that like a after you came off of 2, was it similarly enjoyable? The sort-of post-launch honeymoon phase, or was it trickier? It was horrible, yea it was horrible. I think we were both quite surprised, because we were both very happy with the game and we at least I felt like if people enjoyed the first game, they would love this game, but that was not the case. So, I think it was kind of a surprise to us, and also like it was very harsh, like harsh language. I mean, I'm not against people liking the game for different reasons, I mean we're, it's not a game for everyone. It does a lot of things different from the first game which was the point. But if you like I can see that people like the first game but doesn't like the second game because they're more like forced to play in different ways or maybe it's too much story. But just like how people express themselves to you in comments or emails, I feel that was quite different from the first game. Because I remember there was a lot of critique for the first game as well. At steam for example, but it was more like if there were bugs, people were like posting them, explaining what the problem was, trying to help you, help them, make the game work. And now it's just like, this is a horrible game and hope you all die, you suck and a bunch of swear words. And worse things than that, and that was quite tough, and it actually made me stop hanging out on like forums and that probably hasn't joined since, in that sense, which is kinda sad because it was cool to hangout with the people who play your games, but yea it's quite different now. [Gun Shots, Shattering Glass] When we had finished the game, we had promised to make a hard mode. And that should have been what is the normal mode now. And we should have made an easy mode instead. Remove some windows, remove some soldiers. And our publisher told us, that the game was really hard for them to play and we probably should have listened a lit bit to that. The hard mode, I haven't beaten it myself, I didn't even play it. I think Dennis did the play testing on that. So, I feel like that should have made me realize that maybe it would be better to add an easy mode and call that normal mode. And the normal mode be hard mode. We didn't want to like restart the difficulty in a sense. 'Cause we knew that people who played the second game, would probably be the people that played the first game. So, we kind of want to take it off from where the first game left off, so don't have to play like 3 or 4 level that are just like tutorial in a sense. Should we tell him about the technical difficulties we had? Sure, do it. So, after we had made about half of the game GameMaker ran out of memory So, when we played the game it ran in halfspeed. So, we were play testing a game at half speed. So, that kind of explains why it's very difficult. John Woo mode, slow-mo. When we designed the levels, we wanted it to feel like challenging. Which it shouldnt be, it should be quite easy for us to finish the game. But I wouldn't change anything with like the story or the gameplay or any of that, to be honest we have seen some videos recently who has like almost made a 180° on Hotline Miami 2, that's kind of fun to see like some people calling it a masterpiece and a misunderstood game. More and more people are starting to maybe appreciate it a bit more, seeing it for what it is. [Suppressed Gunshots] It's clear to see that the reception to Hotline Miami 2 has had an effect on Dennis and Jonathan. And while the series lays dormant the 2 have been hard at work on a new game. If there's any lesson to be learned from Hotline Miami it's that the best way to get better at somethingis through learning from adversity. Whatever it is the boys have been working on, they've clearly been enjoying it, and are excited to share it with the world. And hopefully for fans of their games; sometime soon. I'm definitely very excited. Because we have been working on this game for so long now. I'm really looking forward to letting other people play it. Working with Dennis is a really big part of it. It's just very, it's like extremely fun to work with Jonathan, all of these cool ideas that we have. And it's gonna be compared to Hotline Miami, you can't do anything about it, so that's kind of like you have to live with that. It's not a sequel its a totally different thing, so I think it's gonna be judged quite differently than Hotline Miami 2 were. And I think that feels good in a way, it's like a fresh clean start in a sense. [Piano Fading] [Electronic Music] Hey, Danny here from noclip, thanks so much for watching our documentary. Not sure if this is a documentary, more of a like a retrospective or a post-mortem on Hotline Miami 1 and 2. I think the distance from the game really helped the guys sort of open up and talk a little bit about what it was like when it came out and the highs and lows of the various receptions. It's wild to think it's been 10 years since Hotline Miami came out, although but look there's a lot of gray hair. Also this is what happens when I have to cut my own hair for 2 fuckin' years. Jesus, speaking of COVID and remote interviews, while we have been trying out best to spice these ups, and make them a bit better than you just watching Zoom calls by pumping them into CRTs and stuff. We're kind of a bit fed-up with the remote interviews you know, producing them that way and all that. And while COVID still continues to have its peaks and valleys in 2022 we're gonna hit the road. We really want to hit the road more, go visit some if we can't go to studios go to peoples house, go to cities where games were made and catch up with people. You know go to remote parts of the American West and talk to some studios that don't often get the limelight. We have loads of big plans for 2022. And we couldn't do any of it without the support of all the people here, and also hopefully, maybe you as well. If you head over to patreon.com/noclip you can help us out. Literally every dollar helps, it helps us produce more work, it helps keep the team as the team, it helps keep all this stuff influence free. Advertising free, paid content free, we've been doing this for 5 years now. We're really proud that we've never dona any of that stuff and we're always gonna keep it that way. You know, I will close the channel before we do anything like that. So, really the heroes are all the folks that chip in and help us do it. So, thanks so much to all the people here who've been supporting us and thanks to you for watching this videos, and if you're able to, if you have the means consider chipping in and helping us do more work. Thanks so much, and we'll see you again real soon.
