It’s four in the morning on 18th February 2017, and a 19-year-old modder and writer named Spencer Yan is sitting in his college dorm at his computer, with a server full of Discord users eager for him to drop the latest update for Midnight Animal, a total conversion mod and original story built upon the bloodstained, bullet-riddled blueprints of Hotline Miami.
At this point, Yan has worked on Midnight Animal for over a year. The project has grown from a Mod DB page and some well received YouTube trailers to being greenlit on Steam. He has permission from developers Dennaton Games to use the source code, and an entire community of engaged and supportive Hotline Miami fans behind him.
What the community isn’t yet aware of is the drastic creative reimagining the project has undergone in the time since they last saw an update. A transformation from what its creator describes as a “comically dark, pseudo-cyberpunk revenge story” to something far more personal, philosophical and poignant.
Yan has been up for around three days at this point, catching short snatches of sleep in between preparing the update. He fires it off finally at 4am and immediately leaves his dorm, walking along the river he can see from his window to a nearby parking lot where, for the first time in several months, he allows himself to feel like he’s accomplished something big.
This sense of accomplishment, Yan says, was “soundly destroyed” when he returned to his dorm 20 minutes later and began to read the comments.
The backlash had erupted minutes after the update went live.
11 months prior, Yan had failed his first semester at university, losing the scholarship that served as a shield against his parent’s threats to cut financial support if he took classes on “something useless”. This pressure spiralled into long periods of isolation. He lost touch with high school friends. After the breakdown of a serious romantic relationship, Yan made several attempts on his own life.
In June 2016, Yan delayed Midnight Animal indefinitely, citing personal problems in a now deleted Steam post.
It’s worth considering exactly how much attention Midnight Animal had got at this point. A reveal trailer posted on YouTube in September of 2015 currently sits around 50,000 views, with dozens of excited and supportive comments underneath it. Dennaton had been adamant for over a year now they were finished with Hotline Miami. For fans looking for another fix of neon-streaked hyperviolence, the original vision of Midnight Animal, which placed you in the role of a contract killer working for, and eventually betraying, the 50 Blessings group from Hotline Miami 2, was the best methadone in town. Yan was happy to provide, until the realities of the attention the project had gained began to creep up on him.
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Midnight Animal was announced in September 2015. In the ensuing time, Yan had gone from enjoying the attention his skills as a modder had brought him, making friends in the community and dreaming of a future as a systems designer for Ubisoft, to feeling the project had “drifted completely” out of his control. In his mind, Midnight Animal was never intended as the sequel to Hotline Miami 2 some fans were hoping for. Still, he admits the perception of him as the custodian of the franchise allowed him to take advantage of the clout.