Rami Ismail's Top Games of 2020

3 years 2 months ago
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Rami Ismail is one half of the former team best known as Vlambeer, the developer behind games like Ridiculous Fishing, Luftrausers, and Nuclear Throne. He's on Twitter as @tha_rami.

When I was a kid, I would run away from home every time I needed an injection, which was at least once a year for the vaccination I needed for our annual family trip to my father’s homeland of Egypt. I would scream and plead and fight whoever tried to hold me down whenever I was in the doctor’s office. More than once, the sheer fear summoned some ungodly strength in me that injured whoever was unlucky enough to be involved in the process of keeping me healthy.

My doctor was stern and curious and caring the way he has led me to believe any good doctor should be. Every year, he tried a new strategy to avoid the panicked wrath of the rapidly growing child that was me. He tried having me focus on a puzzle, he tried having strong people around to hold me still, he tried tricking me by making me count to ten while he snuck the needle in at three--and while it worked, he realized that that would obviously only work once.

One year, I must’ve been ten or eleven years old, he tried to distract me with a small chat. He asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said I wanted to be a pilot. I hesitated for a second, and corrected myself: I wanted to make video games.

Ever since we had gotten our family’s first computer at age six, I had been rewriting little bits of code to change the games that came with it. I had once changed a game to show my own name, and I’d been chasing that same rush of changing words to change games ever since. But my father culturally had high hopes for me to become a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer. I was bashmohandes Rami, the casual Egyptian honorific for a respected and high-ranking engineer.

“My father thinks I should be a doctor, like you. That way I can help people, and have an important job.”

The doctor looked at me, or I think he did. I might have had my eyes closed. I might have been tensed up, scared with the anticipation for the sting of the needle. I don’t remember anything but the tone of his reply.

“Making games seems like an important job to me. Games make people happy, don’t they? Happiness is very important to being healthy. So how about we make a deal? I’ll help make sick people healthy again, and you help keep healthy people happy.”

I don’t remember the injection that day, but I’ll remember those words forever. You were right, doc.

Best Game: Microsoft Flight Simulator

For the past decade, I spent most of my days doing one of two things: making games, or helping other people make games. While I think most folks that know me on the ‘gaming’ side of the fence know me from Nuclear Throne, LUFTRAUSERS, Super Crate Box, or Ridiculous Fishing, in the industry I’m far more known for the tools I make, and the talks I give about game design, marketing, and the business of making games.

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It started pretty straightforwardly: when Vlambeer was founded back in 2010, it was a tiny two-person studio in the Netherlands with no fans, no games, and no money. To be able to reach international audiences, we couldn’t depend on the games press in the Netherlands, which (while lovely) writes in a language pretty much only understood by the local population. We’d need to go to London--but the money I made selling and servicing computers really didn’t allow for a trip like that. I had some experience doing public speaking from participating in Model United Nations events in high school, and I’d heard that sometimes, good speakers would get paid to fly places. So that was the plan.

Fast forward to 2013, and I had started flying pretty regularly. The talks I gave had become popular around the world, and they had gotten so well-known that I was getting invitations from countries and developer communities that I hadn’t even dreamt of visiting. Sadly, they were often small enough that they couldn’t afford the travel costs and hotel, and I couldn’t afford them either. That stalemate stayed in place until Ridiculous Fishing came out and catapulted Vlambeer from ‘two kids making games’ to ‘a games studio with resources’. My co-founder graciously allowed me to use some of the money we made with Ridiculous Fishing for travel, and I vowed to visit every country that had invited me but couldn’t afford the costs.

The half-a-decade that followed, I made good on that vow, and a lot has happened since. I’ve sung Dutch karaoke in the basement of a bar filled with developers from all over South America. I’ve learned how students eat food cheaply in Indonesia, and I’ve been asked to cut the ceremonial ribbon on new developer associations. I’ve sat staring across each ocean from each side, chatting with developers about their lives and opportunities and challenges. Everywhere I went, I tried to help, connect developers and organisations and investors and governments--and everywhere I went, I learned from the local developers, and from their cultures.

The tempo was grueling, often moving between continents two or three times a month, but I didn’t care much. The people I got to meet were all inspiring, incredible people. As for the travel--I love the hotels--the sameness of hotels around the world, and the vague familiarity of a room you’ve never seen before. And the airplanes? They were my respite from everything, my break from a world that changed all around me all the time. I have always been fascinated by the physics of airplanes, and with the bit of flight training that I had a decade ago, I would stop worrying about everything happening on the ground and stare out the window and look at the wings, and imagine the beauty of the incredible forces lifting a hundred-thousand kilos up into the air.

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Giant Bomb Staff

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