The game was developed as a spiritual successor to a cancelled game from 2004 referred to as Super Carnage, where the goal was to kill as many people as possible. Hotline Miami is divided into several chapters, each of which is further broken down into several stages. At the start of most chapters, the player character "Jacket" wakes up in his apartment and listens to cryptic messages on his answering machine. These messages tell him to perform an arbitrary task at a certain location,