As they call time on indie studio Vlambeer, Rami Ismail and Jan Willem Nijman reflect on their remarkable ten-year journey

BY CHRIS SCHILLING

On September 1st 2020, Vlambeer celebrated its tenth anniversary by announcing its closure. It was, Rami Ismail points out, a quintessentially Vlambeer way to mark the milestone. “It’s very loud. It’s overly dramatic. It’s a little obnoxious, maybe? To say, ‘We’re ten years old! Also, we quit.’” Yet it’s a happy ending, too. Ismail and Jan Willem Nijman, Vlambeer’s two mismatched halves who have consistently managed to make their differences work to their advantage, are ready to move on. “Vlambeer was born of necessity,” Ismail continues. “And I think the end result is that JW and I grew enough that for us, it’s no longer needed. And it’s no longer needed for the industry around it. It did its job, you know? Let it sleep.”

Nijman and Ismail never had a ten-year plan. Not even close. In fact, when they decided to work together, both hoped that one or two games would make them enough money to go their separate ways. It was, as they cheerfully admit, a somewhat uneasy alliance right from the start. “Rami and I had this weird dynamic going on where we didn’t really like each other,” Nijman says, recalling his first memory of Ismail when the two were on a train to their game design course at the Utrecht School Of The Arts. “He was talking about working on this great indie game and it was 3D and it cost money. I was this 17-year-old who made freeware games and was super against triple-A. I heard him talking about this fancy game and I told him, ‘Dude, can you shut up? That’s not indie at all.’” But over the following two years, the two developed a grudging respect for one another. Ismail was ambitious, capable of managing teams, and getting projects off the ground. Nijman was the ideas man, churning out hundreds of tiny games, occasionally producing something with real promise.

Ismail recalls one particular example that impressed him, around a year before the two left school. “He convinced me to play a prototype of his called If You Really Want It, You Can Fly. It looked like all of his prototypes - very simple, clearly made in a day at best,” he says. (“I made it during a lunch break,” Nijman interrupts.) The game featured a small character standing atop a building. Pressing the spacebar would, in theory, make him fly. But each time Ismail pressed it, the man would fall and die, letting out a terrifying scream and leaving a huge impact crater. Ismail tried once more, this time holding the spacebar, and watched as the man flew into space and suffocated, again with a horrific sound effect to accompany his death. “JW was like, ‘No, no. You have to really want it,’ I’m like, ‘What the hell is this kid talking about?’ and so I just stared at this character and said, ‘Fly already, damn it!’ And then as soon as I thought that, he started flying! I had no idea what had just happened.”

Stunned, Ismail looked for some kind of secret trick. Had Nijman pressed a button somewhere, or used a wireless mouse to trigger the flight? The solution was much simpler. There was a hidden timer in the game: if there was no input for long enough, the character would automatically fly. “I got really frustrated that he had read me so well,” Ismail says. “After I got up, I mashed the spacebar in frustration, and as soon as I did, the character stopped flying and fell to his death anyway. JW had perfectly predicted the frustration arc that people would go through. It was unpolished enough that it needed JW standing behind you to explain what it is, and how it works. But that day I learned that JW is really good at game design, and has a knack of making things feel nice in a span of hours, whereas I was the kind of person who worked on game ideas for a year and a half.”

TRIUMPH AND DISASTER

One side effect of the moral victory - and instant success - of Ridiculous Fishing is that people to this day still ask Ismail whether he was thankful for Gamenauts’ clone and the whirlwind it wrought. “Absolutely not!” he scoffs. “Sure, we managed to turn it around. But it was one of the worst development experiences of my life. It took seven days of being stuck in a car together with the team to get that spark of excitement back.” And just as Nijman expresses thanks for the road trip that pushed everybody to restart development, he remembers both he and Ismail were concerned that people would believe Vlambeer’s game was the clone. “That terrified us to the point where we wondered if we should just make something else.” Happily, the studio stuck to its guns and reaped the rewards for its courage.

Nijman joined a team Ismail had assembled for a game project developed outside school hours. “It was incredibly ambitious,” Nijman says. It was basically a full-blown 3D space sim, that we were going to make with ten inexperienced students in six months.” At the time, just about every indie developer wanted to get its game onto Xbox Live Arcade, where smaller games were thriving. Ismail had managed to enter into negotiations with Microsoft about getting the game on the platform. “We had a nice visual style, a good musical identity, and the basic framework of movement in a videogame with some shooting,” he says. “But in gameplay terms, it was less than most of JW’s three-hour prototypes.” But before the team was in a position to land a deal with Microsoft, the school stepped in and prevented Ismail from negotiating further, claiming to own the rights to the game.