Independently of its now meme-fied advice and its grim implications, Streets of Rage is uninterested in self-reflection, and its soundtrack never really gets disturbingly fixated upon the abyss like Hotline Miami does. “Go Straight”, commands the very first track of the second game, and once you get into the groove of its movements there’s no way to do differently. Yuzo Koshiro, the composer at the helm of the series, was among the first to purposefully introduce electronic dance music to videogames, making the exciting punch of house and techno into the driving force behind the colorful depiction of hand-to-hand gang warfare. Hotline Miami’s perfectly synchronized, passionate fascination with violence finds its roots, however, not in any Kondo game but in another production that equated the beat of a bat with the beat of a drum: Streets of Rage (1990). While ‘immersion’ depends on a rationalized suspension of rationality itself, Kondo’s idea functions on a much more intuitive level, appealing to the bodily illusion of an experience of totality.
Hotline miami 1 soundtrack composers full#
Mario composer Koji Kondo’s idea of videogame music meant integrating the pace of play with that of sound, leading to a full hand-eye-ear synchronization. Just like the commonplace comparison of martial arts and dance or the concept of John Woo’s bullet ballet movies, each movement in the game is a corresponding aesthetic step in a future act of violence, and getting your character killed is not an interruption of the flow but one more beat within a steady, repetitive rhythm. The throwback 80’s aesthetic and the neon colors that seep from every frame of the player’s damaged perspective anchor its intensity not to the usual romantic fierceness of the red and the black, but to the more heterogeneous subtlety of a neon-pink sadism whose symbolism comes to be performed in the humid mass of the dancefloor instead of being confined behind closed doors. This is the key to Hotline Miami, both in terms of gameplay and sound – riddled with rhythmic anxiety, this bodily electricity’s only outlet is a perfectly unhinged synthesis of dance and violence. The game’s controls, immediate and simple, replace mental comfort with a physical one, letting the player instinctually drive their avatar in compass to the contrasting rhythms of anguished thoughts, accelerated heartbeats, and a body relaxed. The soundtrack dives straight towards the bottom, allowing no transition to ease us into a new flow, a mercilessness that permeates the whole album as the player commits ever-increasing acts of cruelty. Suddenly, at its end, comes the terrible neck-snapping movement of the crash in the form of M|O|O|N’s “Hydrogen”, hard techno drilling speed back into the surface of the hazy daydream, sweeping its uncertainty away with a beat that aims directly at the throat and doesn’t let go. Everything moves at the pace of a desert dune, accumulating millennia of noise and sand that ultimately fade away into the distant light of a setting sun. It is like falling into a sun-drenched abyss, a car spiraling out of control in the midst of a warm and quiet day. The soundtrack begins with a sleight of hand: Sun Araw’s “Horse Steppin” drags like a tape lost in delay, an unintelligible groan strewn along a slow, slow rhythm.
Hotline miami 1 soundtrack composers movie#
Inspired by the movie Drive, it thrived in the retro with all its implications of nostalgic bad dreams, bringing in a diversity of artists with backgrounds in experimental music, EDM, synthwave, and videogame music, pushing the aesthetic to its limits. It did so mainly by means of rhythmical collage: your eyes dart, your hands move, establishing patterns in time, marking their passing with a punch, the firing of a gun, the crash of broken crystals and busted doors. Not only did it aid spawning the now common inclusion of synthwave and retro-EDM tracks in indie productions, it also achieved a rare integration of music and play mostly reserved to ‘music games’. Hotline Miami (2012) is an utterly violent game enamored with the question of agency as well as gaming’s long-standing depictions of different kinds of aggression, and it has one of the most powerful soundtracks in the medium’s recent history.
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