![]() Your line falls into the water, you pull up fish and then you shoot them with guns to earn points. In it, you control a tiny fisherman sitting in a boat, with a fishing line. Vlambeer made a Flash-based game it called Radical Fishing. And it's legal, in short, because it is not yet illegal. In game development (particularly in the Wild West of mobile game development), they call it "cloning." Basically, someone took the guts of the game, made it look different, then sold it as their own. He looks away and the tears begin to fall.Īct One: You and I would call it stealing Act One: You and I would call it stealing Then, after a long pause, Ismail opens his mouth to speak, then stops. It happens suddenly, like the end of a hard rain. They just sit, staring and thinking - reeling in the wake of the tragedy-turned-triumph they've just relived. That's when a curious thing happens: These two - known for being rambunctious, irreverent, insubordinate and for never shutting up - stop talking. His voice, typically a loud, booming wave erupting from the center of his six-foot-plus frame is beginning to crumble. He's laughing, but it's not the "haha" kind of laugh it's the "ohgod" kind. "I'm finally starting to not be ill anymore after the launch," interjects Jan Willem ("JW") Nijman, the design half of Vlambeer. We know we worked really hard to get here, and we know what we went through to release this game in the end. As if somehow in the repetition of the word he'll find a way through the sensation to a place where he can rationalize how he's feeling. Only when the tale is told, all at once, in a rush, do the men themselves fully realize the weight of it. It is the story of Ridiculous Fishing, and how two men from the Netherlands rallied the worldwide community of independent game developers to take on the practice of game cloning and reclaim their invention to launch what will become (for a time) the best-reviewed iOS game of 2013. ![]() It is a story about the little guy getting bullied and making a stand. The story, told in pieces at least a hundred times in bars, at hamburger joints, on stages and in private circles of up-and-coming game developers, has now been told for the first time in its entirety. "I think 'overwhelmed' is the right word," says Rami Ismail, the business half of Dutch design duo Vlambeer.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |