Nuclear Throne studio Vlambeer is back from the dead

Back in 2020, indie studio Vlambeer celebrated its 10th anniversary by… shutting down. But it turns out, that was a little premature. Co-founder Jan Willem Nijman has announced that he now owns the Vlambeer name outright and will continue developing games under the label — starting with the unreleased shooter Ultrabugs.

Vlambeer was founded by Nijman and Rami Ismail in 2010 and went on to release hits like Nuclear Throne and Ridiculous Fishing. In a statement in 2020, the duo said, “It feels like we’ve achieved what we set out to do – as a studio, as a voice, and as individuals, and we are extremely grateful for these past years.”

According to Ismail, though, the studio never actually fully shut down. It continued to do customer support and maintenance for existing games, and he says that the pair “were not fully happy with where things ended up.” As Ismail wrote on his personal blog, “It felt like a strange limbo in which neither of us could commit the time and effort Vlambeer needed to be maintained, but both of us were dependent on each other to take any action.”

The solution was for one of them to keep the Vlambeer name going, and that responsibility ultimately fell on Nijman, who purchased Ismail’s half of the company. And he already has some plans. First up is the eventual release of the arcade shooter Ultrabugs, which is in development for PC and the Nintendo Switch. After that will be updates for Ridiculous Fishing EX, an updated version of the game that launched on Apple Arcade last year.

One goal will be to ensure Vlambeer’s past games, which are largely available on digital platforms, are still accessible going forward. “I want to preserve the classic Vlambeer games, and make sure they stay playable far into the future,” Nijman says. “It’s too easy for games to get lost in time and that’s a damn shame.”