Jonatan Söderström (born 9 October 1985), also known as Cactus, is a Swedish video game developer. He is best-known as the co-designer and programmer of Hotline Miami (2012) and Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number (2015), but had prior to those games developed over 40 small freeware games, many of which were positively-received.[1][2] His game Clean Asia! was nominated for both Excellence In Visual Arts and Excellence in Audio at the Independent Games Festival in 2008.[3] In 2010, he won the IGF's Nuovo Award, which honours unconventional game development, for his puzzler Tuning.[4]
All of Söderström's games prior to Hotline Miami were created with Game Maker, and he was one of the most-influential developers in the Game Maker community, together with others like Derek Yu.[5] At the GDC 2009, he delivered a talk called "The Four-Hour Game Design", describing the methods he uses in producing his games.[6]
When asked about his game-design-style in an interview, Söderström replied "Variation can be good, but so can consistency. When I make games I try to keep them unified and to the point, so I don't drift off too far. It's also one of the reasons most of my games are so short, when I feel like I want to turn the game in a new direction I usually explore that new direction in a separate game instead".[7]
The games Söderström has created include:[8]