Hotline Miami was a fun little title. Well, fun and frustrating. Funstrating? Anyway, Hotline Miami 2 is already well on the way and has gotten a few gameplay videos to show for it. However, one of the more recent videos that came out of the Rezzed game show has since been made privatefor mysterious reasons. Mysterious no longer.
A recent interview with RPS with Dennis Wedin of the developer-duo Dennaton, sheds light on the situation. It seems that a number of people found a scene in the gameplay footage shown quite troubling. The scene depicted a woman is brutally thrown to the ground before the 'Pig Butcher' straddles on top of her and pulls down his pants, before a director yells "Cut!", and we realize that they're making a movie about the events that took place in the original game. Since then, Dennaton have removed this scene from the game.
"We were really sad that some people were so affected by it, because maybe they had been through something like that of their own. Maybe they had a terrible experience of their own that was triggered by the game. That was not intentional at all. We didn't add the scene just to be controversial.
The scene is no longer in the demo, but Dennaton are working on a way around it, where the scene won't feel as out of place and shocking. If they can't get it to work, they aren't afraid to remove it entirely, though.
"We removed it for the demo. We're going to work with it, see if we can fix it. You get a bigger picture when you play the whole game, which is lost in the demo of course. I respect people's comments and the fact that people voiced them. That's how they feel. Our scene made them feel this way, so we have to think about why and if there's something we can do to make it better. I don't think it's right to just say, "You're wrong. You're just looking at it wrong." That's not the way to go."
I can understand the shock some people felt, especially since the scene feels so out of place. It's never given a sense of context during the gameplay demo, which left the whole thing with an uncomfortable lack of closure. But if fictional, pixelated rape is this troubling, how can we accept fictional pixelated violence? What is okay, and what isn't? If it's all fictional anyway, should we be troubled by rape depicted in videogames? And if so, then what about the massive amount of violence? Why are we not contemplating the lives of innocent pedestrians as we clip their legs with our Lambo in GTA 4, and watch them fly across the hood? Are acts of rape and murder suddenly okay if we're just given a context to these actions?
Either way, Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number is slated for release sometime next year. So hold the line. He... he...
