Rami Ismail at the Reboot Develop Blue event.
Rami Ismail at the Reboot Develop Blue event.
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Rami Ismail interview: Indie creativity, games and politics, dirty funding and getting back to making games

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 17 min

Rami Ismail became famous as an ambassador for the indie games industry. He even won an award for his work from the Game Developers Choice Awards in 2018. But he closed his studio Vlambeer in 2020 after 10 years of making indie games with Jan Willem Nijman.

Since that time, he has been a consultant, a public speaker, a curator of talks and more. But he doesn’t have any games to talk about at the moment. During its 10 years as a two-person company, Vlambeer was responsible for making games like Ridiculous Fishing, Luftrausers, and Nuclear Throne.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.