The founders and now former co-owners of prolific indie studio Vlambeer have announced only one of them will continue with the company. On X/Twitter this morning, Jan Willem Nijman and Rami Ismail announced that Willem Nijman has bought out Ismail’s shares of the dormant entity and now controls one hundred percent of Vlambeer.
Founded in 2010, Willem Nijman and Ismail developed more than a dozen games under the Vlambeer banner, including Nuclear Throne, Ridiculous Fishing, Luftrausers, and Super Crate Box. The studio was announced to be shut down in 2020, with Vlambeer’s then-final game Ultrabugs still planned to be released following the closure. Four years later, Vlambeer’s Ultrabugs is still planned for release sometime in the future. “After my current unannounced project is done, I will make sure Vlambeer’s long-anticipated ULTRABUGS gets released,” Willem Nijman affirms in a tweet.
Why shift ownership of a long-inactive company? Rami Ismail provides a great answer to that very question in a blog post about his departure from Vlambeer and his future. The studio may not have been making new games, but there was still work to do on what had been released.
“Vlambeer never quite fully ‘shut down’ though – you can’t just walk away from a decade of your life and a dozen games like that. As our careers continued, with dwindling amounts of time we had for it, we tried to keep up with customer support & maintenance,” writes Ismail. “Vlambeer needed to be maintained, but both of us were dependent on each other to take any action.”
Jan Willem Nijman echoes this sentiment in his thread announcing the purchase of Vlambeer shares, saying, “I want to preserve the classic Vlambeer games, and make sure they get the maintenance they need to stay playable far into the future. So many games get lost in time and it’s a damn shame!”
Outside of the long-awaited Ultrabugs and a planned update for iOS angler Ridiculous Fishing EX, it’s too soon to know what the future for Vlambeer is. However, based on the words of both founders, the accessibility and playability of its catalog are now in better hands with one owner rather than two.
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