GOING DUTCH
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
