Nuclear Throne Studio Vlambeer Is Closing Its Doors After Ten Years

I have to admit that I've never heard of this company before.

Sad news for everyone involved but Ismail.
That bloke can shove a cactus where the sun doesn't shine...sideways...

@Einherjar can you elaborate

My favourite Vlambeer game is Ridiculous Fishing - a rare mobile game that stands out on its own merits.

That’s a shame, I love both Nuclear Throne and Ridiculous Fishing.

Loved Luftrausers. Good studio.

@Einherjar The only thing I’ve seen him do is speak out against Trump’s travel ban because he’s a Muslim and GamerGate because he’s not a 12 year old virgin. If he’s done something dodgy then it would be good to know.

Huge fan of Luftrausers. Vlambeer was great.

@nessisonett What exactly is the gamergate everyone keeps talking about every now and then?

@commentlife

Rami Ismail is half game developer, half political activist. If you follow his twitter feed, a lot of it is just screaming about Trump and god knows what else.
He doesn't come across as very psychologically well adjusted. He's more of a "everyone who disagrees with me is evil" type person.

@Vepra If this is a serious question, my best advice to you is to probably just carry on not knowing what it is, and don't get involved. It really isn't worth the effort.

@Vepra It was a harassment campaign against several prominent women in the video game industry. It was basically gamers’ way of pushing back against progressivism. They doxxed, bullied and threatened to rape and kill women such as Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian. For whatever reason, people still hold onto their undying hatred for these women and basically any prominent woman in the industry so their inboxes are still filled with abhorrent nonsense to this day. If you researched it then you’d probably find more detailed explanations but it was the moment that separated ‘gamers’ from normal people.

@Vepra

It's best described as a series of internet political wars that happened quite a few years back in the games industry. Each "side" will tell you it was about completely different things than the other side will. Best to just ignore because it's mostly just a lot of confusion with people talking past one another, as most political arguments on social media tend to be.

@Dezzy @nessisonett @AhabSpampurse Thanks for the clarification everyone.

@Dezzy There’s no sides. There were internet trolls and victims. Literally a simple google search will prove that. Wars implies action on both sides when it was only one way.

Nuclear Throne was quite good. Shame to read this. Good luck to them for the future.

@status-204 Name an example of Zoe Quinn’s ‘side’ threatening to rape, kill or maim a gamer?

@nessisonett

I'm well aware of the fact that the media heavily reported one side of it and ignored the other. It doesn't mean that's the reality of what happened. Plenty of people on the other "side" of it received death threats and abuse too, but the media simply refused to report on it. Go and listen to some of the old interviews Total Biscuit did with the BBC for some examples. The abuse he got was pretty obscene.

@Vepra It was a campaign for clarity in gaming journalism after it came to light that an indie game developer promoted by several sites slept around with people working there. Soon enough it was discovered that several people promoted their personal friends without disclosing the friendship on those sites. But because the first developer calls herself a “feminist” (a blatant lie on her part) the whole things was framed as a “harassment campaign against women in gaming”. The term “GamerGate” was coined after 10+ sites at once released “Gamers are dead” articles. It happened in 2013-14.
So called Social Justice Warriors are still angry about it because it was the first pushback against their cronyism and they lost.
Also the original lady went on to abuse more people and led at least one developer to suicide after profiting off of this entire thing (she even appeared before UN to talk about mean tweets). Thankfully she seems to have been forgotten.

@SmaggTheSmug Well you’re a delight. Good thing the world’s changing and the tide’s turned.

Don’t bother spouting this stuff as fact, literally 99% of video game commentators dismissed the ‘sleeping around’ as a bunch of crap made up to discredit Zoe Quinn for existing. I mean, that’s really the best they can come up with? Casual slut shaming?

@status-204

It's even worse than that. The claims about harassment are almost impossible to get evidence for, as most harassment and death threats are completely anonymous.
One "side" could've orchestrated all of the death threats against themselves in order to use it to get media exposure and we would have absolutely no way of knowing.
We do know that when the FBI investigated it quite extensively, they ended up charging no-one because they couldn't figure out who was responsible. That to me is a good sign you should be slow to believe any particular claims.

I am guessing everyone copying their games and releasing them for free (with ads) on mobile finally got to them.

@nessisonett She admitted everything, and so did the five guys. Your own are going against you on this.
It was her then boyfriend that posted about this, to warn people of her abuse.

@Dezzy I like your way of handling topics like this. You acknowledge things that you can't know and i just hope not too many will think you're implying anything, bc you're not. I hate when a rational discourse isn't possible bc the other side expects arguments to imply that you're siding with one party.

Btw, never heard of gamergate before so it's interesting to see you all talk about it.

@nessisonett Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian are absolutely not angels and neither are their critics. Anita is a con artist and Zoe Quinn pushed another indie game developer to his end. Their critics wrote and did nasty things too. There is bad on both sides. I remember one video of Sarkeesian's where she was trying to explain that video games promote violence against women, one of the examples she used was Hitman: Absolution. In the footage she used, she attacks a female civilian in game in an attempt to prove her point. However, her own footage disproves her point as in the top corner you can see points are subtracted from her score when she attacks the female civilian. The subtraction of points are obviously a punishment for wrongdoing. This happens when any civilian is killed by the player in that game as the goal is to only take out your target or "hit". That's just one thing I personally remember about Anita and one of the many factors that led me to believe she was dishonest about her work.

@SmaggTheSmug That's a fair description of it without getting super messy. Thanks!

@Luminous117 same

Boring company that made shallow games. Nuclear Throne was garbage if you compare it to recent games in the genre, the only thing it had going was the fact it was relatively quick to follow Isaac. No great loss and have absolutely no doubt Ultrabugs will be a shallow throwaway piece of trash too.

I always found it odd that Nuclear Throne has never been on sale once on switch. Makes sense now that you described one of them. Sounds like a piece of work and would never want to give people a deal

Gotta be Ridiculous Fishing... Such an awesome game.

These guys made pretty good games but I'll never forgive them for not patching nuclear throne on vita and leaving it forever in a broken state

Rami Ismael? Just another of these professional victims. Using your minority status as identification, and your job as a means of getting into sanctimoneous politics.

Glad he's gone to be frank

@Snesionetty ? Just another commenter dropping buzzwords because a guy on the Internet said things they didn’t like.

I’m glad he’s gone... wait sorry. Hang in their champ. Just because you are stuck in a logical sandtrap, doesn’t mean you should stop blessing us with your commentary.

Very sad. I’d so hoped that Luftrausers would come to Switch along with the previously indicated Vlambeer Arcade game(s).

[EDIT] Just read the comments.. wow, this got super political. I like the commenters here, but personally, I’d rather just talk about the games.

Ridiculous Fishing is one of the most unique and entertaining mobile games. Most games that use gyroscope (or whatever) for motion controls end up feeling gimmicky whereas Ridiculous Fishing I couldn’t imagine it being half as fun with out. If your playing out in public you will definitely get looks as you swing your phone around while you attempt to get your fishing lure, with chainsaws and toasters equipped, to the bottoms of the lake, or sea.
Just reinstalled it on my new phone and gave it a replay. Highly recommended.

@Zaphod42 Hear hear! Ridiculous Fishing was (is) a great little mobile title!

@Stargazer Agree 100%. I cannot stand the companies that made broken ports for the Vita (fantastic console) and acted like they did their customers a favor by even making it available at all. Zero sense of pride in their work or responsibility to provide a functional product.

@commentlife
To name one example:
He's more political activist than game developer, opportunistically jumping on every bandwagon he can.
When game difficulty and "accessibility" (Which are two very distinctive things) were the current hot topic, he jumped in to belittle devs for making hard games and calling them out on being exclusive.
He, himself was involved in "Nuclear Throne", a twin stick shooter roguelike much like "Enter the Gungeon" which is also rather hard.
When Ismail was asked for an easy option years back, he told people off and told them to "git gud".

Rami Ismail is not a prick, he's the whole cactus.
Let's leave it at that, as some people here already have an aneurysm over their favorite Twitter conspiracy theories

@Krull agreed. That’s an awesome game

@Vepra Basically the #metoo of the gamer world from what I understand, and a lot of it turned out to be BS which made the real stuff going on look like BS. It was a huge cluster. I am sure there are more nuances to it but that is the gist.

@nessisonett it was about ethics in games journalism.

@durr Yeah yeah, Befehl ist Befehl and all that.

@nessisonett cope buddy

Ravi is pretty talentless and tough to get along with so I'm not surprised the artist moved on. Ravi can still be on speaking tour once covid let's up.

Nuclear Throne is one of my favourite games ever. Those two years of active Early Access development were a joy to follow. Super Crate Box is a gem of an arcade platformer.

Totally recommend people spend some time checking them out instead of waisting that time reading the comments here.

@pinta_vodki Me too! I’ve put over 350 hours into NT across PS4, Vita and Switch. I also particularly adored Super Crate Box on Vita, before they removed support for PS Mobile (or whatever it was called 🤔)

Sad to see a dutch game company die, though I have to admit I never played any of their games.