Vlambeer's Ridiculous Fishing surfaces on iOS this month
"It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that Ridiculous Fishing nearly ended Vlambeer."
Vlambeer, the studio behind Super Crate Box and Serious Sam: The Random Encounter, is releasing its highly anticipated iOS game Ridiculous Fishing on 14th March.
Ridiculous Fishing is a collaborative between Vlambeer, Solipskier creator Greg Wohlwend, and the man behind Spelltower Zach Gage.
For those unaware of Ridiculous Fishing, it's the commercial sequel to addictive browser pastime Radical Fishing. The goal is to lower your lure as deep as possible while avoiding fish only to grab them all on the hook's ascent. Once they're on your line, you launch them into the air and shoot the airborne sea creatures with increasingly hazardous firearms.
Radical Fishing got a little media attention when a game called Ninja Fishing shamelessly copied it. Despite being a blatant clone, Ninja Fishing went on to reel in 12 million users.
This success hurt Vlambeer's morale as it was concerned Ridiculous Fishing would be perceived as a clone and the project was nearly cancelled. "The cloners never intended to yield: they admitted to 'being inspired' by our game and launched their game to great success," lamented Vlambeer's Rami Ismail on the company blog. "With that, our motivation and progress suffered a blow we didn't recover from for far longer that we are comfortable admitting."
Ridiculous Fishing went on to receive an IGF nomination for Best Mobile Game last year, but even that didn't raise the developer's spirits in light of the ugly cloning business combined with more recent projects being added to the docket. "We would've killed the project right then and there if it wasn't for the enormous outpouring of support from fans and press alike," Ismail noted before adding "It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that Ridiculous Fishing nearly ended Vlambeer."
Eventually the team persevered anyway and started to make a lot of progress ahead of PAX Prime 2012 and finally the game is complete and approved by Apple. Check it out in the punchy announcement Vine below.
