The Distance

We were not sure this interview would happen. When we first emailed Rami as we were preparing this issue, he was immediately down. Then he went … quiet. Wrangling Rami into a couple of conversations with Kill Screen founder Jamin Warren proved to be a delicate dance of emailing, texting, emailing again, occasionally checking his Twitter feed, and waiting. Phone calls were missed and rescheduled. This is not a complaint about talking to Ismail; in fact, it’s why we wanted to in the first place. We finally caught up with him after he touched down in Seattle on his way to a videogame convention.

On the way to turning his two-man studio Vlambeer into an action-game powerhouse, Rami Ismail’s own star rose. He is now one of the handful of people globally and immediately associated with independent game development. With Vlambeer, he has established a brand of videogame action tighter than James Brown’s rhythm section, while also producing and distributing free tools to help other small teams get off the ground. He’s a permanent fixture on the festival and lecture circuit thanks to his endless quest to facilitate games as a medium and to break down our Western and Northern hemispheral biases. As a result, he’s one of the primary catalysts of videogaming’s development away from rote power fantasies and toward a global medium for human expression.

The following is Rami’s story in his own words.