Going Dutch
Rami Ismail and Jan Willem Nijman call time on Vlambeer, and a remarkable ten years
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 tenyear 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.”
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.
Being denied their moonshot was sufficient encouragement for the two to quit the course, having realised their different skillsets complemented one another perfectly. “JW had this community that challenged each other to make stuff quickly,” Ismail says. “And the main skill he got there is that he tried a lot of game ideas which inherently made him a better designer, and in trying to stand out meant he had to find really effective ways of making the game feel better. I think that trademark Vlambeer feel definitely comes from there. That’s JW.” Ismail, on the other hand, had a knack of taking nascent ideas and making them accessible, turning them into potential commercial products.
He could also help tidy up Nijman’s code. “If I had to describe JW’s coding style, this would not be a very polite article,” Ismail begins, before immediately abandoning any pretence of politeness. “There’s something to be said for just writing shit that works. With a big emphasis on the word ‘shit’. Because JW’s code was… I think it genuinely made grown programmers cry, like, two or three times in our career.” Nijman immediately shoots back: “That says more about programmers than my code.” Ismail frowns. “I think it’s a little bit of both. We can be a little stuck up, but some of the code was genuinely rubbish. One of my favourite anecdotes will forever be the time I was trying to port some of JW’s code, and there was a comment that said ‘Advanced math ahead’, and it was a sine wave which is probably one of the most basic mathematical properties in the world.” Warming to his theme, Ismail continues: “There was another time where the basic camera code was this seven-line monstrosity with every type of trigonometry in the world in there, just smashed together until it worked. It took me a day to turn it into an approximation of what he had written.” Nijman laughs. “Especially in the early days, we were a bit… well, you could compare it to a food truck where the food is really good, but you definitely don’t want to see the kitchen.” Quick as a flash, Ismail responds. “So in that case, I was the Food Inspection?”
The two continue their good-natured bickering as we ask about the game that transformed their fortunes. Whether or not Crates From Hell – later to be renamed Super Crate Box – had its single-crate spawns from the start is still a matter for debate between the two. The more important thing, Ismail eventually notes,
is that Nijman’s original concept was desperately close to realising its potential, but wasn’t quite there. Ismail realised it was his job to convince his new business partner that, of all his game ideas, this was the one that would establish Vlambeer as a force to be reckoned with. “It felt special,” he says. “Most action games are about finding the right [weapon] and then using that until your ammo runs out. And JW took that away and collapsed it into a really elegant system.”
Having assembled a team with trusted friends from school and Nijman’s indie contacts, the newly-formed Vlambeer realised it needed money, and Nijman quickly prototyped a new idea: a fishing game with guns. At that point, it became clear that the pair’s ‘getaway plan’ was bearing more fruit than either imagined it ever would. Ismail ported Nijman’s Game Maker prototype and sold it to a Flash website as Radical Fishing, earning the studio enough money to pay for development of Crates From Hell. “That collaboration kicked in between JW coming up with a very clever, elegant design and then me helping to polish the user flow, and bringing it to a platform,” Ismail says. “We hashed out where the problems were, and then we sold it. And that loop just continued, despite our intentions to make enough money to survive and then find our own path in life. Instead we kept it up for ten years.”
Even at this early stage, the two were thinking about the studio’s identity. It was, Ismail says, a necessity partly because they disagreed on so many things – although they were always able to come to an accord on the big decisions. Its logo, meanwhile, came about from “a napkin drawing of a bear on fire”. But if that was Vlambeer, it needed a name for the projects it made purely for money, or any experimental fare that didn’t belong under the same banner – hence Radical Fishing crediting its creators as ‘Not Vlambeer’. “We quickly got better at making games and being commercial just by having done it once or twice,” Ismail says. “So we retired that brand really quickly. The idea was: here’s where we make random nonsense, and it might be a little broken. Whereas Vlambeer is where we released videogames which are also a little broken, but a more controlled kind of broken.”
You’d be hard pushed to describe the newly-retitled Super Crate Box as broken.
Together with artists Roy Nathan de Groot and Paul Veer, and composer Eirik Suhrke (latterly responsible for Spelunky 2’s dynamic score), Ismail and Nijman delivered a brilliant debut game. A taut and refined single-screen action-platformer – think the original Mario Bros. with guns, played at five times the speed – it was an instant calling card for Vlambeer, even before the ports to iOS and Vita that cemented its reputation as a modern arcade classic.
Little wonder, then, that Devolver Digital – itself a relative newcomer to the industry – came calling, convincing Vlambeer to develop a Serious Sam spinoff. Initially, Nijman says, the pair were reluctant, despite being fans of the series. “We were very aware of not wanting to sell out,” he says. “We needed to keep our indie cred and make great games, and then on the side if we had to make decisions purely for commercial reasons, we’d keep that separate. And this was like, ‘Eurgh, a publisher.’” Ismail chips in: “We thought they were suits, effectively.” The two didn’t take Devolver’s offer seriously, and Nijman decided to send in a jokey pitch “to see if they didn’t just want a Super Crate Box reskin with Serious Sam characters to make some quick money, because that’s what we thought they wanted”. He shows us a pencil sketch he drew of a JRPG-style battle, with stick-figure characters on the right of the screen running backwards and shooting towards a horde of generic enemies approaching from the left. This, he says, was the pitch in its entirety. They sent it over, not expecting the response they soon received. “We got an email back, saying: ‘That looks great, let’s do it,’” Nijman laughs.
It was a smart move on Devolver’s part, proving that the fledgling publisher was prepared to give Vlambeer creative freedom. This settled the studio’s unease – and helped it gain a foothold among indie devs, since Ismail and Nijman could vouch for it. And though few would make a case for The Random Encounter being the studio’s finest hour, its success proved to Devolver there was a commercial market for indie games. For Vlambeer, meanwhile, getting a game on Steam meant it could keep funds ticking over while it worked on other projects. There was no longer a need for the Not Vlambeer label. If the studio’s plan was to make ‘better games, not bigger games’, it now found itself able to do both. By then, Nijman and Ismail had found their specialities and quickly separated their responsibilities. “I stopped bothering with business stuff, and Rami trusted me more with game design,” Nijman says. “We got to a point where whenever we disagreed about something, it was clear who made the final call. And so we became a well-oiled machine.”
But with the studio’s profile on the rise, suddenly disaster struck, and the machine ground to a halt. Its next project had begun under much happier circumstances. Via a mutual friend, Ismail and Nijman had been introduced to designer Zach Gage, who had just released Lose/Lose, a version of
Space Invaders that deleted files from your computer. Then artist Greg Wohlwend
– one half of fellow development duo Mikeandgreg, developer of Solipskier
– became involved, and the four decided to develop an iOS version of Radical Fishing, to be retitled as Ridiculous Fishing.
“iPhones were relatively new, and
Canabalt had proved that you could do mobile games, but beyond that indies on mobile wasn’t a given,” Ismail recalls. “So we wanted to do that because it was cool and it felt kind of prestigious and above our weight” – a running theme among Vlambeer’s output. With Suhrke back on board, Wolhwend’s distinctive angular art style and Gage refining the user experience to eye-opening effect (“It was a huge lesson for us,” Ismail admits) it seemed nothing could go wrong.
Until, that is, a year into development, when Gamenauts released the brazen clone Ninja Fishing. Ismail, otherwise effusive throughout our interview, lets out a deep sigh. “That will remain, for a long time, one of the weirdest days of my life.” It was, he notes, the first bad thing that had happened to Vlambeer in two years of operation, and it came at a point when he and Nijman were still riding the wave of the studio’s early momentum – having perhaps failed to realise they had been overworking themselves. “Both of us just kind of shut down,” Ismail recalls. “I pulled myself back into work mode with a headache unlike anything I’ve ever felt before and just started writing emails to the cloner, and to anybody that could help us to figure out what our options were.” A lawyer told them there was nothing they could do; that game mechanics couldn’t be copyrighted. And Ismail realised he didn’t
want Vlambeer to sue anyway. “The idea of owning gameplay ideas sounded terrifying, because then Nintendo or Microsoft or PlayStation or whoever could do it, too.” He and Nijman, both of whom prided themselves on their principles and moral values, had seen the cynical, business-focused side of the industry, and it left them demoralised and deeply upset.
With production halted and the team struggling for motivation, Vlambeer came perilously close to going out of business. It probably would have, in fact, but for the grace of now-defunct Canadian developer Halfbot, which generously offered to port
Super Crate Box to iOS. That provided Vlambeer with the resources to keep going, though it took a road trip across the US with Ismail, Gage, Wohlwend and Michael Boxleiter (the other half of Mikengreg) for the team to properly get its mojo back. “We called it A Week Of Hatred, because at the end of that trip we were either going to hate each other or this game was going to get done,” Ismail says. “And somewhere during that trip, we found enough energy to sit down and give the project another push.”
In the meantime, Vlambeer had kicked up enough of a stink that the cloning story generated a storm of sympathetic coverage. “JW and I had a conversation where we were either going to shut down the studio and just give up, or make a major shit-show out of this, make our statement and stand up for creativity and for original games,” Ismail adds. But it needed more than its relatively small Twitter following to make its outrage heard. “We thought if we were going to go out this way, then we were at least going to go out making some noise.” A New York Times profile and widespread newspaper coverage elsewhere taught the pair that it was worth trying to punch above their weight. A memorable GDC talk followed.
Though the pair say they wouldn’t want to go through it again, it proved a productive break from development, all told. As Gage and Wohlwend started working on side projects – the latter providing the art for puzzle classic Threes
– Ismail and Nijman channeled their anger into the blistering sepia-toned dogfights of
Luftrausers. “When we started development [of Ridiculous Fishing], we were a bunch of indies that nobody had heard of,” Ismail says. “By the time we were wrapping up, all of us had our own career. The game was finished by a team of… it’s a very embarrassing term, but everybody called us indie rock stars.” (Edge, for its part, went with ‘indie supergroup’.) “Either way, we were certainly known entities.” Then the game came out, and Vlambeer’s triumphant comeback was complete. True to its subtitle, Ridiculous Fishing really was A Tale Of Redemption. Universal acclaim and an Apple Design Award followed, as the platform holder crowned it iPhone Game of the Year.
“Even from the press side, it felt like everybody was cheering for us. Like, ‘You made it!’” Nijman beams. Ismail, meanwhile, says the response reinforced his belief that Vlambeer was making games for all the right reasons – and that the industry could still support distinctive, original work. “For a moment, we got worried that the creativity and hard work of making interesting games was not the way to be. That the way to be was to rip off whatever you saw and then you make a million dollars. Because that’s exactly what [bracket] I put the clone in. And it felt like the industry collectively said, ‘No, you’re right. That is what games should be’. At least, that’s definitely how we heard it.”
It was a no-brainer for Vlambeer to partner once more with Devolver for
Luftrausers’ release the following year. Devolver had published its breakout hit in
Hotline Miami in the interim, yet success hadn’t changed the natural camaraderie both parties shared, Nijman says, “because we’d also been nobodies together”. The publisher’s assistance, Ismail admits, was particularly important, since both he and Nijman had agreed they needed to work smarter. Exhausted by the cloning episode, they didn’t want to relapse into bad habits. “Those first two years where we worked so hard, we were at the age where you can get away with it,” Nijman begins. “I mean, you can eat trash every day…” Ismail butts in: “And we did, oh boy! But we pushed ourselves to the limit.” Now, Nijman says, it was time to grow up, to be more responsible. “What he’s saying is that after Ridiculous Fishing, we were suddenly really tired,” Ismail laughs. “That was the new thing.”
Even so, there was little evidence that Vlambeer was slowing down much. Just as
Ridiculous Fishing was completing its long development journey, the studio started developing a new game – and this time, it took a very different approach to development. It began when Minecraft developer Mojang asked Vlambeer to be part of a three-day charity game jam. Nijman had been trying to build a prototype for an ambitious action Roguelike for some time, which proved the perfect candidate for the event. “Vlambeer had this weird cadence of: make prototype, prototype gets good reception, make game,” Ismail says. “Any game we made had to be fun within a day, otherwise we didn’t trust ourselves to finish it,” Nijman adds. The jam went so well that the studio was keen to do it again, reckoning that preparing a game in the open for Early Access would be one way to make sure it didn’t get cloned. “We’re documenting this!” Nijman says, triumphantly. “Yeah, we have the receipts this time!” Ismail replies, and both break into laughter.
A top-down shooter conducted at breakneck speed, with permadeath raising the stakes of its intense skirmishes, Nuclear Throne (formerly Wasteland Kings) launched in Early Access in October 2013. Vlambeer committed to a similarly fast-paced schedule of two livestreams and an update every week. “It was very fun,” Ismail says, before the deadpan follow-up: “For the first, like, 20 weeks.” Nijman concurs: “I have very fond memories in the same way that you do of being on a tropical beach, where you forget about all the mosquitoes and that you had diarrhoea and sunburn. In the end, you only remember the tropical beach. So it was tough, but I also have good memories of working with the team.”
The game was a hit from day one, quickly attracting a fan following for its combination of characterful mutant heroes, its kinetic action and screen-shaking explosions – and those rapid-fire updates. Suddenly, Vlambeer needed a community manager; despite having vowed to take his foot off the gas, Ismail found himself assuming that role. Mistakes, he admits, were made – particularly during the middle stages of development, when it became too easy to simply add new ingredients rather than refine what was already there. “When you’re tired and you’re working on a game with weekly updates, it’s very easy to just get away with, ‘Okay, we added eight more guns,’ instead of doing the actual difficult work, like a settings menu or stuff like that,” Nijman says. “You can kind of see the weeks where we had a bit
more stress and it’s just like, ‘Hey, there’s five more guns and three enemies’.”
While adding all those extras was good for the game in some respects – and popular with the growing Nuclear Throne community – Ismail believes it ended up “over-complete”. By the end of 2015, that familiar feeling of exhaustion had returned, and both knew it was time to draw a line under the project. “So we brokered a deal with Sony, to get the game out there in a fun, explosive, big way; a nice, Vlambeerstyle finish,” Ismail says. But the suddenness didn’t sit well with everyone. “Nobody saw it coming,” Nijman admits. “The community was like, ‘What the hell, the game is done? Why?’ But there’s not much more we could have done.”
Still, it was another successful launch for Vlambeer, both critically and commercially. That in turn gave its creators the latitude to take a well-earned break. And so they did, separating to pursue personal passions. For Ismail, that meant continuing his charity work and community projects, travelling around the world to promote industry diversity and amplify voices from studios in developing countries. For Nijman, it meant continued experiments in game design, but also realising his desire to make games in a more sustainable fashion. To which end, he made puzzle adventure Minit with Kitty Callis, Dominik Johann and Jukio Kallio, the game being credited to all four developers rather than a single studio name. “We didn’t do any crunch,” he says. “It was just a very leisurely project. My life became more about taking things a bit easier, and eating good food. I slowed down a bit, and in a way it was good for my craft.”
The plan was for a year apart, which eventually turned into 18 months, by which time the two had reorganised their lives around their new priorities. Still, they were excited to get back to creating together once more, with the aim to recapture the studio’s early days of smaller, simpler games – albeit with a healthier work schedule and a diet that no longer consisted of instant noodles and Coca-Cola. During a Nintendo Direct broadcast in early 2019, it announced Vlambeer Arcade, a planned collection of smaller games, starting with top-down shooter Ultrabugs. It was almost finished. But something had changed. There was no pressure any more, but there was no momentum either. “It was very smooth to get nothing done,” Ismail says. “There were never any hard feelings or tiredness or annoyance, because this wasn’t top priority for either of us,” he shrugs. “When Ultrabugs happened, it happened. But JW had obviously changed his tempo and the way he worked. I had changed my focus to be way more about the community and growing access to our industry.”
Whether they were pacing themselves or whether their other concerns had taken precedence, the pace of development slowed further and further. “We were both doing the things we cared about, and I think both of these things are important,” Ismail says. “JW’s flatter studio structure is the kind of beacon work that I really appreciate. It’s something that you can hold up proudly, and it’s incredibly important for the future of indie that people are trying these new structures.”
Meanwhile, Ismail realised that his efforts to widen access to the game industry for developers, regardless of social and financial circumstance, meant little if he needed to be personally involved; that structure, in other words, needed reinforcement. “I realised that the things I do, I do. The network I have, I have. There’s no externalised way of keeping that. Somebody once told me that you haven’t built something well unless you can die, and it continues. And I realised there’s not much I’ve built where that could happen.”
From the start, Nijman says, both he and Ismail realised that Vlambeer ran better when each gave the other more space, which allowed them both to excel at what they do best. But perhaps now that space had grown too wide. “We got to the point where Ultrabugs has been almost done for a year and a half, but it’s still not out. Maybe it was time to give each other the ultimate space, and do our own things.” The end was never planned, but in late August the two amicably agreed that it was time for Vlambeer to call it a day. And with the studio’s tenth anniversary just around the corner, why not go out with a bang? “Like always, it was like ‘Alright, two weeks, let’s get everything done and build a beautiful end to this company,’” Nijman says.
Despite the pair’s evident disdain for the ‘rockstar’ tag, this is, we suggest, an exit befitting the term. “I think the problem is that it has a lot of connotations we don’t necessarily like,” Ismail says. “We’re not loud for the sake of it. We always had very clear goals.” Nijman attributes the studio’s relative groundedness to its relatively gradual growth (“You get used to the spotlight, instead of suddenly blowing up,”) while Ismail adds that it has benefitted from a number of happy accidents.
Becoming an industry spokesperson has been a natural result of his need to travel outside the Netherlands to promote Vlambeer’s games. Nuclear Throne’s open development stemmed from concerns about being cloned again. “I also kind of hope that the rockstar era for indie games is over, because nothing really good came out of that,” Nijman adds. “It idolises individuals while there’s whole teams making games, and I think putting people on a pedestal also encourages really bad, diva-ish behaviour.” Ismail agrees. “If you look at our industry, the rockstars from the 20102015 era of indie games all ended up in places that are at best questionable.”
In an industry where developers rarely get the opportunity to go out on their own terms, Vlambeer’s closure represents one last moment where it gets to set an example. Both parties are happy. The company’s finances are in good shape. The two won’t ever be best friends – “We always said we wouldn’t invite each other to our birthdays,” Nijman says, and Ismail immediately agrees – but it’s evident there’s plenty of mutual respect between the two, and both feel they’ve grown a great deal.
“It’s been an incredible ride,” Nijman says. “An unlikely fairytale of two very different people who somehow ended up in a company together in the right place at the right time and made this diverse portfolio of games about shooting things.” Ismail, meanwhile, acknowledges his debt to Nijman for giving him the space to travel the world. “Vlambeer has given me many gifts, but seeing the world of game development… well, just seeing the world… there are no words for how lucky we’ve been,” Ismail says, “or for how grateful I am to have done this thing with JW – even though we didn’t see eye to eye, we always had each other’s back.”
While Vlambeer may be no more – at least once Ultrabugs finally comes out – its two figureheads aren’t going anywhere. “I don’t think me and JW will talk very much in the future,” Ismail says, “but if there’s ever anything I’m really stuck with that I need a moral check on, I’m pretty sure I would call JW first.” His former colleague grins. “I’ll send you an invoice.” Ismail laughs. “Yeah, I’m sure you would.” It’s heartening to know that some things never change.