Jonatan Söderström

Jonatan Söderström, also known as Cactus, is a Swedish video game developer noted for his unusual and innovative games. 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 reviewed and lauded even in the mainstream video game press. His game Clean Asia! was nominated for both Excellence In Visual Arts and Excellence in Audio at the Independent Games Festival in 2008. In 2010, he won the IGF's Nuovo Award, which honours unconventional game development, for his puzzler Tuning.

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. At the GDC 2009, he delivered a talk called "The Four Hour Game Design", describing the methods he uses in producing his games.

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". This further explains Söderström's unusually high output of concentrated games, most of which were developed within a span of two years.