You’ve probably played Radical Fishing by now. I hadn’t until this week, however, and that was stupid of me, as it’s brilliant. Vlambeer’s browser treat doesn’t have the poise or detailing of the team’s magnificent Super Crate Box – a small game, but one that has clearly been reworked until it approaches something dangerously close to arcade perfection – but it’s a genuine broad-strokes pleasure nonetheless. It’s quick, twitchy, and it comes with a purposefully primitive art style that clicks beautifully with its two central mechanics - mechanics that give the illusion of having been almost carelessly thrown together, like a clanking stretch limo welded into existence by hillbilly grease monkeys.
It’s simple, really. In Radical Fishing, you catch fish, and then you shoot them. In the first part of the game, you drop your line into the water, seeking to avoid passing groups of cod and tuna to get as deep as possible, before reeling in while trying to now hit as many as you can. Once you return to the surface, your catch is blasted high into the air, and you’re given a targeting reticule to blow them to pieces in ragged showers of red blood.
The original Radical Fishing
There’s clearly a market for shotgunned fish in the Netherlands – or perhaps on the internet at large – because you earn money for your blasting, money that can then be spent at the shop, where you find boosts, longer lines, chainsaws, hats, and all the other sorts of things that videogame shops will often try to sell you.
The reason I’m writing about Radical Fishing now is because Vlambeer has an iOS version in the works. It’s called Ridiculous Fishing, and it looks equally wonderful. The reason I’m writing about that, however, is because, as IGF chairman Brandon Boyer recently tweeted, a company called Gamenauts is working on a clone, titled Ninja Fishing - and the clone is going to beat Vlambeer to market on the App Store.
Ridiculous Fishing’s a bit of an all-star line-up job, as Vlambeer’s working with Zach Gage and the Solipskier artist Greg Wohlwend – the Greg part of Mikengreg Games. The team’s promising new weapons, new power-ups, and – the stuff royal decrees are made of - hats for the fish.
Vlambeer's Ridiculous Fishing for iOS
Meanwhile, Gamenauts may have made a few changes of its own to Vlambeer’s template, but only in the sense that its backed its car up to yet another designer’s mansion and made off with their jewels too, replacing Radical’s second act shooting with a very familiar flurry of Fruit Ninja swipes. (In a statement the Gamenauts made while speaking to TouchArcade earlier this week, it said that, “We brought the fishing mechanic into the game but wanted to deliver it in a new way. We intend to give the proper credit to Vlambeer for the original inspiration.”
Inspiration and iteration can be hard to pull apart in the incestuous world of iOS development, where great games often build upon other great games. That said, in this case, it’s very hard to see exactly which of its own elements Gamenauts is describing when it speaks of delivering Vlambeer’s mechanics in “a new way”. Ripping off Vlambeer, Wohlwend, Gage and Halfbrick makes Gamenauts the Danny Ocean of gaming – while the limp cartoon graphics the studio has dressed its work up with indicates it wants to be the Billy Ocean of gaming, too. Ninja Fishing’s offensively inoffensive MOR visuals lack both the energy of Vlambeer’s original doodles and the pastel intricacy of Wohlwend’s reworking.
On his blog, in fact, Wohlwend seems to express a controlled rage, describing Ninja Fishing’s aesthetic as “an all-too-familiar-middle-of-the-road-McDonalds-hamburger art style”, and adding that “my point is not that Gamenauts is doing something illegal or that original creators should be able to lock down design with patents or other nonsense, my point is about common decency.” He’s right.
It’s strange, really, that we refer to this nasty practice as cloning – a name that may suggest a certain degree of moral ambiguity, but also insinuates that, even as Lazy Peon pinched Desktop Dungeons wholesale from QCF Design and shoved a buggy reworking of it onto iPhone, it was somehow simultaneously doing vital work at the most far-reaching extremities of human experience and scientific imagination.
Yet even then, I don’t think I really understand the motivation. Certainly, Gamenauts gets a design that has already proved popular with audiences, but is that really enough incentive to destroy your reputation? In hacking the game together and making its clone work, the company has done all the hard stuff – the reverse-engineering, the coding, the slapping on of the art – and it seems weird that it’s chosen not to then go on and do the fun stuff too, such as coming up with new ideas from scratch or at least varying the mechanics in ways that go beyond bolting on chunks of yet another purloined classic.
Gamenauts can take the concept, and, in all probability, will be able to race onto the App Store and make money. What it can’t get, though, even as it cannibalises Vlambeer’s sales, is that amazing moment I had in Radical Fishing where I realised that the game’s music was stitched together from the same beats, buzzes, and quavering synth chords that the team also put to work on Super Crate Box – that amazing moment when the creator’s personal quirks show through.
When you have no originality in your games, you can have no history, and you can have no personal quirks. You’ll end up with customers, perhaps, but not genuine fans – and games built around the concept of customers alone are often pretty miserable.