Two of Åkerblad's sketches for the new 'Hotline Miami' cover art, plus one image that served as inspiration, from Marvel's Transformers comic series of the 1980sĪs El Huervo, Åkerblad is an essential part of the sound of Hotline Miami, with three tracks on the game's soundtrack, beside contributions from artists including Sun Araw, Jasper Byrne, and Scattle. You wanna draw manga-hero Strider, being bad ass." Nobody wants to copy the cheesy white guy on the Strider cover. Obviously, it would suck if everybody tried to copy the cover, and not follow their own visions. I also figured nobody would try to copy the style in his or her own fan art if I did it this way. And be as generic as I could with the posing, like they did back in the 1980s (which is when the game's set). "So I actually tried to do the characters the total opposite of how I saw them in the game. But in the game he looks like some manga dude, onion-shaped brown hair blowing in the wind, and drawing his sword faster than any Kurosawa samurai could ever dream of. It's super cheesy, and he's waving his sword in an awful pose. Strider on the Mega Drive has a real Aryan-looking dude on the cover. "The cover was supposed to fill in the blanks that come from the obvious abstraction of 8bit-ish graphics. Åkerblad also took inspiration from older video games, from an era when stylized graphics were the norm, with realistic character design a good few console generations away from being realized. Goes to show how much I know about sports." I just figured he had some random American football jacket with a team's logo. That's how the 'B' on Jacket's, uh, jacket came to be. It was cool because all the characters just existed from a top-down perspective in super low-res sprites, so aside from verbal things like 'sleazy Russians' and 'pig mask,' I could do whatever with it. "But I thought I should do it, so they ultimately left it in my hands. "They wanted a cover in a VHS kinda style, and initially looked for artists online," he recalls. He's the only ray of 'hope' for (the original game's protagonist) Jacket."īut Wedin and Söderström didn't immediately ask Åkerblad to provide what would become some seriously iconic imagery for their game. And it was real honorable, like, because Beard is the coolest character, I think. Obviously, that must've done something, because after hearing my song "Daisuke," they decided to put me in the game. "They basically had their mind set on everything after fiddling around with a prototype, so there wasn't much I could do except hang around sometimes and cook nutrient-rich food-I can't survive on tofu and fish sticks. The character of Beard, that's him, plastered all over the art for the second game. Which I'm not, but it was flattering." The Dennaton pair took such a shine to Åkerblad that it's not just his art-and music, as El Huervo-that's in the original Hotline Miami and its 2015 sequel, Wrong Number. Wedin thought I was like some kinda Zen person back then. "They started doing (entirely out-of-its-mind indie game–cum-music video nightmare) Keyboard Drumset Fucking Werewolf. Soon enough, Åkerblad was hanging out with the pair. "We didn't really hang out at the thing much, but on the way back home on the train, he showed how to eat instant noodles raw, and that was kind of the deal breaker for me. "I met Jonatan at No More Sweden, a sort of game jam thing, in 2010," Åkerblad says. Hotline Miami, by Jonatan Söderström and Dennis Wedin (under the banner of Dennaton Games), was a couple of years shy of completion, but the core concept was blossoming. It was in 2010 that Åkerblad's life was taken in a new direction, one that'd ultimately lead to his work being seen by millions across the world.
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