The Art of Farcical Violence: Hotline Miami was Special

Featuring: Ongoing Experiments in Scalp-Camera Gameplay

BACK TO WORK

Alright, folks. I had a thoroughly restorative several days in the wake of Psycho Patrol R’s Early-Access release. But retreat from the grisly real world is ever-fleeting, the ferryman expects his due, and the time has come to stare into the abyss once again. There are two subject areas occupying my attention this week:

1. Scalp-Camera gameplay, upon which I’ve smugly introspected since I coined the term a couple newsletters back

2. Excessive violence — it is, after all, difficult to avoid the news lately

I therefore took a break from prostrating myself at the fanged altar of Consumer Softproducts this past week in order to replay Hotline Miami, a reliably effective instrument of stress-relief for me since its release in 2012. It also helpfully clarified some assumptions I made going into the experiment I mentioned a couple weeks ago, on which I’ll update you at the end of this newsletter. Do enjoy, and be sure to check out The Spieler’s exploration of the scalp-camera phenomenon if you’re new around here. Otherwise, brace for a newsletter unaccountably fascinated with the tops of dudes’ heads. It’s embedded just below:

Right, then:

HOTLINE MIAMI WAS SPECIAL: A HISTORY

It’s difficult to overstate the impact that Hotline Miami had when it landed on Steam in October of 2012. It might be hard to imagine from atop the soaring towers of 2025’s indie gaming scene, but most of us gamers back then hadn’t seen such an over-the-top celebration of top-down violence arguably since 1990’s Smash TV. No wonder, then, that Hotline Miami blitzed through 130,000 sales in its first seven weeks in addition to what Devolver Digital head Graeme Struthers described as a “staggering” number of illegal distributions, which they (rather ingeniously) didn’t bother trying to curb.

The tremendous consumer interest subsequently caught the attention of Sony Entertainment’s impressively bloated publishing arm, which brought Hotline Miami to the PS3 and PS Vita early that following year in an effort to shore up the conglomerate’s then-extant indie credibility¹. It moved about 1.5 million copies by the time of the sequel’s release in 2015, cementing the franchise’s place in video gaming history forevermore.

Those numbers live rent-free in my head, because they establish with hard statistics what I had already intuited as a seventeen-year-old in 2012: Hotline Miami was effing special. After replaying it this past week and thinking it over for a few days, I came up with this shortlist of criteria that define the Hotline Miami experience as I understand it (in no particular order):

• Dynamic, heart-pounding gameplay

• Bomb-ass original soundtrack

• Ludonarrative synchronicity

• Farcical-yet-meaningful violence

Those first two should be wholly straightforward for anyone who’s watched even five seconds of Hotline Miami gameplay. Against a backdrop of saturated kicks and acidic, stabbing synth melodies, the experienced player eases into a meditative flow of immaculate slaughter. I don’t want to fixate on the second-to-second gameplay here, though. To tell you the truth, it just barely holds up under the weight of my 2025 sensibilities: the controls are jumpy and stiff, the encounter design is inconsistent at best, and… dear God, the fucking doors in this game — they have minds of their own and were responsible for a solid third of the failures in my most-recent playthrough.

Above: Doors are a notoriously difficult problem in game design, and every implementation has its foibles. In Hotline Miami, the doors rapidly swing open and closed if you intersect their space, occasionally with hilarious results.

Besides, other games have long since iterated upon and arguably perfected Hotline Miami’s core mechanics. OTXO (pron. “OH-cho”) is a recently prominent example that polishes the raw gameplay to a gleaming luster and matches or exceeds the soundtrack’s more gut-rending qualities. I thought about OTXO a lot while replaying Hotline Miami, because I was reminded that the latter is special for reasons largely discrete from its famously cathartic primary gameplay. Let’s talk about why, and then I’ll let you know how The Spieler’s experiments in scalp-camera evolution are going.

LUDONARRATIVE SYNCHRONICITY: MORE THAN JUST KILLING

I’ll start with a brief terminological aside for those of you leading fulfilling lives away from the cesspits of discourse on video game storytelling theory. Strap in for some Category-Five nerd shit: “ludo” is the Latin root meaning “game” from which we derive the term “ludonarrative dissonance,” a descriptor coined in 2007 by Ubisoft grandee Clint Hocking to describe the cognitive dissonance that arises when a player’s gameplay obligations are at odds with a game’s narrativization. One very common example: a game’s plot insists on some kind of acute urgency (“the dragons have returned — you must warn the Jarl right away!”) but enforces no consequences for completely ignoring said urgency (you instead waste ten hours catching butterflies and picking flowers while the dragons do nothing, patiently waiting for you to begin your Hero’s Journey).

“Ludonarrative synchronicity,” then, is its opposite: it occurs when the player’s gameplay obligations reinforce the game’s narrativization. I believe this term might have been introduced by Yahtzee Croshaw in his 2017 review² of Horizon: Zero Dawn, and that game is a good example of the concept in action. Its story begins with a granular focus on the protagonist herself and then gradually expands into a sweeping epic about the world in which she lives, mirroring the gameplay’s initial focus on becoming a credible hunter before it settles into the lofty open-world exploration loop as the map opens up.

The original Hotline Miami is, to my mind, an underrated paragon of ludonarrative synchronicity. Its narrative structure has much of the film Jacob’s Ladder about it, presenting as a smeared medley of fragmentary visions and uncanny hallucinations. It covers motifs from addiction to psychosis but never fixates on any one for long, bookending every massacre with abstract pastiches on whichever subject occupies the game’s attention in the moment. You grasp the underlying plot through gradual osmosis over multiple playthroughs, in which sense it’s all a glorious epitome of gaming’s unique storytelling capabilities. But how is this ludonarratively synchronous?

Well, if you’ve ever suffered a manic episode or horked down a fistful of unmarked pills in an alleyway behind the club, then you’ll probably intuit the synchronicity I’m getting at. If not, the short version is that when your brain is flooded with superphysiological levels of neurotransmitters, your humanity is suppressed and your primordial id guides your actions in place of your evolved rationality. The protagonist of Hotline Miami is a drug-addicted wreck of a man persistently addled by trauma, and we know this despite the game sharing no straightforward exposition to that effect. In exposition’s stead are a neon-dominant color palette, some deeply evocative pixel art, and a camera fascinated by the main character’s scalp.

MEANINGFUL VIOLENCE: THE BLOODY ART OF WHOLESALE SLAUGHTER

But enough about the subtle, more sinister forms of violence that we know from prestige television and modern office culture. I still haven’t talked much about old-fashioned heritage violence — you know, the kind with the blood and the guts and the men writhing in agony as they breathe their last through a foaming thoracic wound. Before Hatred came out and soured everyone’s buzz, you know, Hotline Miami was something of an index example among that puzzling archetype of folk that calls for banning video games. Some people just wouldn’t know good art if it savagely caved in their skulls with a crooked tire iron.

The physical violence in Hotline Miami is absolutely farcical, I’ll grant you, but the farce is calculated and deliberate. Stand it against other cartoonishly violent games like Bulletstorm or MadWorld in which extreme violence is employed all but arbitrarily and often for humorous effect, and you’ll see what I mean: in Hotline Miami, nobody ever gets kicked in the nuts or ground to a paste against a moving subway carriage. Its violence is very matter-of-fact — if an attack doesn’t kill someone outright, they’ll need to be finished off before they stand up. And if the only weapon you have to hand is a saucepan of boiling water, well…

My point is that the absurd degree of violence exists in service of the holistic narrative experience. The blood, gore, and suffering are a bemusing counterpoint to the thumping music during the fights, and then it all becomes a source of discomfiting self-reflection after you kill the last enemy. Here, have a look at this screenshot of one particularly bloody mission’s aftermath:

Above: I was wearing the collectible alligator mask, which doubles the gore effects and serves no other purpose. That’s the masked protagonist in the center on his “did I do that?” energy.

In almost every mission, after all the mobsters are liquidated, the exhilarating music abruptly gives way to a staticky, foreboding drone that plays throughout the ten or twenty seconds it takes to walk to the level exit. During that time, there are no threats to the protagonist’s safety whatsoever, and nothing for the player to do except walk and reflect. This is the game encouraging you to think, “gosh, that’s a lot of bodies… did I have too much fun with this?” It’s a difficult tightrope to walk: go too far in one direction, and the player will resent you for interrupting the fun. But go too far in the other, and it’ll come across as debased, sophomoric, and hypocritical³.

So, why is Hotline Miami so special? For me, the answer lies in its esoteric combination of satisfying gunplay, gritty spritework, and commitment to interrogating the supremacy of violence. It’s more compelling in the latter respect than are peers like Ruiner or OXTO because, even while the gameplay is less sophisticated, the violence is contextualized by the story and by the humanity of the victims in addition to the sheer brutality of the visual design. Literally every character in Hotline Miami comes across as utterly inhuman while on their feet with scalp to camera, and then all too human when they’re hurt and laid low.

And now that we’re back to talking scalp-camera perspective, let me finally update you on The Spieler’s progress with evolving the scalp-cam formula.

ONGOING EXPERIMENTS IN SCALP-CAMERA GAME DESIGN

It’s serendipitous that I find myself devoting all this excess mental energy to the gratuitously detailed study of such a simple game, because — and this may astonish you, so brace yourself — recreating a primary mechanic from one of the most legendarily innovative titles of the 2010s after a yearslong break from amateur game-dev turns out to be quite hard.

When last we spoke on the matter, I was telling you about my idea for a scalp-camera game based around a further maturation of Darkwood’s field-of-view mechanic. I began with a review of the literature, i.e., I scoured YouTube and various game-dev forums to see what clever implementations the community had thought up since the game released in 2014. Alas that every solution I found was either immensely overwrought or hopelessly simplified. And while I’m sure there are umpteen game-dev Discord servers packed to bursting with elegant solutions, I’m not in any of those. So, I swallowed my pride and did what most jobbing programmers do nowadays: I asked the goddamn Borg for help.

Or, more accurately, I insolently demanded an implementation strategy of ChatGPT because I was bored and frustrated and wanted a few yuks. I was quite impressed at first when it recognized what the hell I was on about, but soon felt a soothing warmth come over me as I read its suggestions and realized that game designers will never be replaced by LLMs. It offered a total of four strategies, each presented with a delusional confidence that would make Sean Murray blush. They were:

1. An incomplete Unity implementation with snippets of code lifted directly from a Sebastian Lague video that I’d already seen in my research

2. An incoherent Godot implementation with unreadable code that looked randomly sequenced

3. A “General Algorithm” written in an obviously different voice with bewildering word-choice as if copied from a forum poster for whom English was a new language

4. A one-sentence entreaty to “consider using shaders.”

So, yeah, I ain’t exactly “feeling the AGI.” LLMs only “reason” insofar as they can draw statistical correlations between their training data, and an elegant reimplementation of the Darkwood vision effect is simply too tall an order when most of said data was sourced from anonymous teenagers on unmoderated forums. Oh, well — I guess we’ll have to settle for meat-based intellectual labor as if this were the Dark Ages. Some techno-optimist utopia.

I did agree with ChatGPT’s milquetoast suggestion to “consider using shaders,” however, so I spent several hours over a few days brushing up on vector geometry and drafting an actual implementation.⁴ There’s a very solid chance that it won’t work and that I’ll need to start over. But if it does work, then I believe I’ll have the best solution to this problem outside of Darkwood itself. Neat, right?

Still, I realized in my tinkering that the specifics will depend on how I decide to implement other dynamic game objects, so I’ll need to keep you in suspense awhile longer while I mull that over. For now, I’m going to follow the Shestovian current of my imagination and give some thought to how we might reimagine scalp-cam combat and its presentation.

On that subject, I’ve got to give props to the good-hearted correspondent from my last newsletter on the subject who brought several more scalp-camera games to my attention. Two in particular are very pertinent to this discussion:

1. 2021’s Intravenous (and its sequel), whose gameplay synthesizes Darkwood’s limited perception with Hotline Miami’s high-octane gunplay toward a primary gameplay loop that looks distinct from both. It looks like the confluence of these mechanics produces something compelling in its own right.

2. 2021’s Devil Slayer – Raksasi, which… defies a pithy summary, so I recommend the trailer. I’m most intrigued by its character animation, which appears to use 2D skeletal deformation to get detailed and expressive dynamics out of its painterly, hand-drawn artwork. It’d kick ass to not draw several thousand frames of sprite animation from scratch like Hotline Miami famously required.

These are precisely the sorts of innovations I have in mind when I think of “evolving the scalp-cam formula,” so big thanks to Jim for bringing them to my attention. Both games leapt right to the top of my backlog, and I’ll give them a play when next I get paid. Oh, that reminds me…

We’re starting to run long again, so I’ll call it a newsletter for now. I anticipate plenty more time to think about scalp-camera combat — see ya next week!

1. They had just published Journey as a PS3 exclusive, which is so hilariously unlike Hotline Miami in concept and core appeal that I can’t help but applaud Sony’s bravado.

2. I’m not gonna link to the video because some content-farming ghoul would get paid for your click instead of Yahtzee, but you can read the transcript here: https://zeropunctuation.fandom.com/wiki/Horizon_Zero_Dawn

3. In case you’re wondering, I think Hotline Miami 2 is an inferior experience largely because it so often tumbles off this end of the tightrope.

4. In case the reader is an unrepentant nerd who gives a damn about the specifics: I’m pretty sure I can do it with a 2D fragment shader that’ll only draw the pixels whose vector forms an angle from the normalized line-of-sight vector greater than half the protagonist’s total FOV. The inverse sine of the quotient of those vectors’ dot product over the magnitude of the UV vector should establish the angle in question, and then I’d just need to check the truth value of a simple inequality.