# Hotline Miami
Hotline Miami is a top-down action game released by Dennaton Games in October 2012, built around masked assassins, brutal one-hit kills, and a neon synthwave soundtrack. Its retro 1980s Miami aesthetic and punishing combat spawned a devoted online fandom that turned the series into shorthand for outrun style and speedrun-friendly ultraviolence[2].
## Origin
Hotline Miami was made by Swedish developers Jonatan Söderström and Dennis Wedin under the name Dennaton Games and published by Devolver Digital, releasing on October 23rd, 2012 for PC[2]. Players control an unnamed assassin, later nicknamed Jacket by fans, who works through apartment blocks and clubs killing mobsters at the direction of anonymous phone messages[3].
The sequel, Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number, followed on March 10th, 2015, adding a harder difficulty setting, more masks, and thirteen playable characters across a fractured timeline[2]. Metacritic logged review scores of 85 for the first game and 76 for the sequel by March 2015[1].
- **Platform:** PC (Steam) / Reddit + YouTube (fandom spread)
- **Creator:** Jonatan Söderström and Dennis Wedin (Dennaton Games)
- **Date:** 2012
## Overview
Hotline Miami is a 2D top-down action series where a silent hitman answers cryptic phone calls, pulls on an animal mask, and clears each floor of a building in bursts of one-hit kills before the level restarts on death[2]. The loop is fast, loud, and unforgiving, and each mask flips the rules, swapping starting weapons, movement speed, or lethality of unarmed attacks[3].
The visual style leans hard into 1980s Miami, all pink neon, VHS grain, and pixel gore, paired with a synthwave and outrun soundtrack that fans quickly treated as a genre-defining playlist[1]. That mix of style and mechanical punishment is what pushed the game past a normal indie release into a recurring reference point for speedrunners and outrun fan art communities online[4].
## How It Spread
The fandom organized quickly. The /r/hotlinemiami subreddit launched on October 22nd, 2012, one day before the game shipped, and became the main hub for fan art, mask theorycrafting, and speedrun clips[3]. On November 17th, 2012, YouTuber SoundtrackVideoGame uploaded the full original soundtrack, which pulled in roughly 3.2 million views and 5,800 comments over the next three years[6].
Let's Play coverage pushed the games further. Rooster Teeth posted gameplay footage on June 13th, 2013[5], Markiplier picked up the first game on May 29th, 2014[7], and jacksepticeye's March 14th, 2015 playthrough of Wrong Number gathered more than 1.1 million views and 4,800 comments in its first two weeks[8]. On March 16th, 2015, the /r/gottagetagrip subreddit spun up as a shitposting and inside-joke offshoot for the series[2].
Beyond Reddit and YouTube, the outrun aesthetic drove fan art elsewhere: by July 14th, 2016, deviantART returned more than 4,100 results for "hotline miami," with additional fandom pockets on Tumblr and 4chan's /v/ board[2]. Urban Dictionary entries even repurposed the name as slang for a flawless speedrun or for clearing a building in a mask with a bat[4].
## How to Use
In fan usage, "pulling a Hotline Miami" typically means clearing a space in one violent, uninterrupted run, often referenced with a chicken mask, a baseball bat, or a synthwave track pinned to the clip[4]. Speedrun communities often use "Hotline Miami speedrun" as shorthand for replaying a level until it can be finished flawlessly in a single attempt[4].
## Frequently Asked Questions
### What is Hotline Miami?
Hotline Miami is a top-down action video game series by Dennaton Games, built around masked assassins, one-hit kills, and a 1980s neon Miami aesthetic scored with synthwave[2].
### Where did Hotline Miami come from?
Swedish developers Jonatan Söderström and Dennis Wedin created it under Dennaton Games and released it through Devolver Digital on October 23rd, 2012[2].
### What does Hotline Miami mean?
The title refers to the cryptic phone calls that send the protagonist on hit jobs, and it is also used online as slang for a flawlessly speedrun level or a masked, weapon-in-hand clearing of a building[4].
### How do you use Hotline Miami?
Fans use the phrase to tag ultraviolent action clips, outrun and synthwave edits, or speedruns where a stage is cleared in a single unbroken attempt[4].
### Is Hotline Miami still popular?
It is treated as a classic indie touchstone, with an active subreddit, ongoing outrun fan art, and lasting influence on synthwave and top-down action games since its 2012 launch[3].
## References
1. [https://www.metacritic.com/game/hotline-miami/]()
2. [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/hotline-miami]()
3. [https://www.reddit.com/r/HotlineMiami/]()
4. [https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Hotline%20Miami]()
5. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIZYjrx4LbM]()
6. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exg_OxsaHyY]()
7. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKD-MVfC9Ag]()
8. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SctZthwm0Co]()
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Source: https://meme.com/memes/hotline-miami
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