Early on in Hotline Miami, you come across a helpful tip: “Recklessness is rewarded.” Little do you know how well that will hold true. Set in Miami circa 1989, the 2012 video game follows an unnamed protagonist as they receive coded messages to embark on a kill-first, ask-questions-later quest. In the first chapter, an innocuous voicemail asking you to step in as a last-minute babysitter is actually an order to stab six mafia members in an apartment, and you don’t find this out until you’re already inside with blood dripping from the knife in your hand. The game is ultra-violent and ruthless, and for many players, frustratingly hard. It’s also considered to be one of the most influential video games of the past decade.
Perhaps the best part of Hotline Miami is the haunting music that plays while you’re thrown into various killing sprees. The soundtrack has racked up nearly 15 million plays on YouTube alone, with the general fan sentiment best summarized by the top comment: “It’s really cool that this soundtrack came with a free game.” Dennaton Games developers Jonatan Söderström and Dennis Wedin knew from the start that a carefully curated soundtrack was crucial for Hotline Miami. “It was really important that the music and the game itself didn’t feel too inspired by video games because most of the inspiration for it came from movies,” Wedin explains over Zoom from his home in Sweden. Drawing heavily from the 2011 film Drive, they placed a strong emphasis on contrasts: modern techno and retro graphics, cute animal masks and aggressive kill methods, vibrant neon colors and the dark burgundy of blood.
Everything is intense, but that intensity is what makes it fun—especially when it comes to the soundtrack. The tracklist spans bass-rattling techno, hazy vaporwave, and experimental electronic music from Sun Araw, CoConuts, and a few then-undiscovered Bandcamp acts. Even the surge of synthwave that Drive helped revive surfaces in Hotline Miami through interludes and conversation scenes. Söderström and Wedin spent weeks prowling for the perfect music and, all told, listened to “maybe 2,000 songs” before finding the right ones. “It’s almost like we made a big mixtape in a sense,” says Söderström.
The most beloved tracks in the game come from M.O.O.N., the Portugal-via-Massachusetts project of Stephen Gilarde. He was just 16 when Söderström and Wedin stumbled on his debut self-titled EP and offered to pay $400 for each track. As a high schooler with one EP to his name and no promotion, it was mind-blowing. “It’s a weird feeling to have my first thing be this cult classic,” Gilarde says over Zoom. “It changed my entire life.” A year prior, he was hospitalized with clinical depression and had dropped out of high school, twice. “At that point, I was just really angry at myself, angry at the world, at my small town—normal teenager stuff cranked up to a thousand and no real outlet for it.” So, he started making techno. Though there’s no lyrics, all four songs—“Paris,” “Crystals,” “Hydrogen,” and “Release”—are audibly irritated, from the pulsing bass to the harsh pitch of hi-hat claps and stuttering synths.
That underlying angst made M.O.O.N.’s songs a perfect fit for Hotline Miami. Created primarily on Ableton by tinkering with presets and splicing loops, his contributions center around dissonant melodic intervals and bass-heavy BPMs that increase the player’s heart rate, a key part of the soundtrack’s efficiency. A song like “Hydrogen” helps players sharpen their focus while simultaneously ratcheting their anxiety, egging on a desire for revenge. On difficult levels, the sheer repetition of techno helps detach you from the unsettling feeling of bashing someone’s skull with a baseball bat or shooting a guard dog with a machine gun before it attacks you. The Hotline Miami soundtrack doesn’t just sound cool; it’s a stylish aesthetic-turned-mindset that intentionally helps players numb the problems around them.
“Rather than get you cognitively engaged, techno is actually trying to—as one neuroscientist said—free you from the ‘dominance of reality’ and let your mind drift off into other places without worrying that you’re going to miss something,” explains Berklee professor and music psychologist Dr. Susan Rogers. When overlaid with the game itself, the music’s effect becomes a delicate balance of repetition, cross-modal perception, and synths as a unique neural reward for imagination, urging players to disassociate in a fun way. “In the case of electronic music, it’s not cognitively taxing,” she continues. “We don’t have to think about it in order to enjoy it.”
In addition to bolstering the 2010s indie-game surge, Hotline Miami helped popularize the trend of pairing adrenaline-pumping electronic music with fast-paced combat, vibrant color schemes, and stylish kills. In recent years, that combination appears in games like 2022’s Rollerdrome or 2019’s Project Downfall. Perhaps it’s because they already signed Hotline Miami, but video game publisher Devolver Digital has a keen eye for high-octane games with this dynamic in particular. Ruiner is a brutal 2017 cyberpunk shooter set in the future, and Katana Zero is a 2019 neo-noir about an assassin who must kill enemies and manipulate time to dodge attacks. Both games boast icy techno soundtracks that were pressed to vinyl. Then there’s My Friend Pedro, the creative 2019 side-scroller shoot-em-up that went viral thanks to its inherent GIF-ability. That game’s ominous score sounds like Trent Reznor hosting a Blade rave.
“Those games all elicited strong emotions, be it laughter, excitement, or just incoherent yelling,” recalls Robbie Paterson, a representative from Devolver. The cross-modal perception that comes into play with all of these games tends to reward sensory overload—bright colors, fast movement, loud music that keeps you alert while getting you to focus—which is what gives unrelenting games that distinct rush. Paterson boils it down even more: “Generally, if a game pops up that looks weird and feels good to play, we’re interested.”
Anyone who’s held a joystick knows that pairing violence with techno isn’t a new phenomenon. Back in 1992, Mortal Kombat set the benchmark by letting you literally rip out your opponent’s spine while the game’s legendary theme song “Techno Syndrome”—despite the titular yell, it’s not called “Mortal Kombat”—throws electronic punches of its own. The song soundtracked Pepsi-fueled Sega Genesis marathons in basements nationwide, prompting a parental panic so severe that Congress launched its first hearing on violence in video games.
If violent games are a way to engage in taboo activities like fighting without actually harming others, then it’s their soundtracks that keep players locked in. According to video game researcher and clinical psychologist Dr. Anthony Bean, the music acts as a lure to keep gamers immersed—and electronic music, especially subgenres with faster BPMs like techno, is particularly good at that. “That music is supposed to create a trance, and if we’re being stimulated visually, tactilely, and auditorily while gaming, you’ve got three of the five [senses] right there,” he explains. “That symbiotic relationship gets us ready to prepare, if we lose, to get right back into the rhythm of the game.”
In other words, Mortal Kombat killed so that Hotline Miami could massacre. But what differentiates Hotline Miami from the violent games of yore is how it still looks and feels cool years later. When Söderström and Wedin designed it, they did so with one foot in the past and another in the future—a decision that has kept the game incredibly replayable. Better yet, none of the games that have followed in its gory wake have topped it.
