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Hotline Miami 2 - Developers Reconsider Rape Scene

Journalists Disgusted With Demo Presentation

During the Rezzed 2013 (a convention for PC/independent games in England), a group of hand-picked journalists were allowed to test a playble version of Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number. After doing so, many of them were appalled by what they had just seen. The reason for this was the following scene:

The demo has the player make his way through a tutorial as the character "Pig Butcher". At the end, the player meets a blond woman lying helplessly on the ground. While the game demands "FINISH HER", the player loses control over his character who automatically goes over to the blonde and drops his pants (clearly suggesting an upcoming act of rape). In this moment, a voice in the background yells "CUT!" and the level is unmasked as a scene from a film shoot.

Die kontroverse Szene / Bild-Quelle: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

A female journalist wrote in an article for PC Gamer that she felt "betrayed" and "hurt" by the sexist depiction of the woman in that game scene.

Dennis Wedin, one of the developers, expressed his dismay about the reaction in a subsequent interview with the website Rock, Paper, Shotgun:

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. There is a meaning to these two characters. There’s a lot more to them than just this scene.

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.

Whether they will re-insert the scene back in the game at a later stage, Wedin replied:

We’ll see. We’re gonna see how people react to it when we test the whole game. We’ll get opinions and stuff like that. We’ll see how we can present this in a good way. In a way that we want it to come across. Not just as provocative. That’s not our meaning at all.

Release: Sep 12, 2013 - Author: DarkChojin - Translator: Mike Lowrey - Source: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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