Ridiculous Fishing

Ridiculous Fishing
Developer(s)Vlambeer
Publisher(s)Vlambeer
Producer(s)Rami Ismail
Designer(s)Jan Willem Nijman
Programmer(s)Zach Gage
Artist(s)Greg Wohlwend
Composer(s)Eirik Suhrke
Platform(s)iOS, Android Windows Phone
Release
  • iOS
  • March 13, 2013
  • Android
  • November 19, 2013
  • Windows Phone
  • May 21, 2014
Genre(s)Action
Mode(s)Single-player

Ridiculous Fishing is a fishing video game developed and published by Vlambeer. In the game, players use motion and touch controls to catch fish and subsequently shoot them out of the sky for cash. The game was released for iOS on March 13, 2013, then later that year for Android.

Players cast a fishing line into the ocean and use motion controls to avoid fish as the hook sinks and to catch as many fish as possible as the reel retracts. Players then touch the screen to shoot fish out of the sky for money that can be spent on upgrades.

The game was first released as a Flash game Radical Fishing with the same basic mechanics. A year after Vlambeer began their iOS development, Gamenauts released Ninja Fishing, a clone of the game. The team worked on other games and spoke publicly about the situation to a standing ovation at the 2012 Game Developers Conference before resolving to scrap the majority of their work and finish the game. Artist Greg Wohlwend moved in with iOS developer Zach Gage to work 14-hour days on the game.

Ridiculous Fishing received "near-universal perfect scores" at launch[1]—what review score aggregator Metacritic describes as "universal acclaim".[2] It won an Apple's 2013 Design Award and was their iPhone game of the year. Reviewers noted Vlambeer's struggle against the copy of their game and praised the game's balance and both visual and game design. A 3D remaster of the game developed by KO_OP, titled Ridiculous Fishing EX, was released on Apple Arcade in July 2023, 3 years after Vlambeer went defunct. As of June 11, 2024, the Android version is no longer downloadable from the Google Play store.

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference Polygon: Cloned at Birth was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference Metacritic was invoked but never defined (see the help page).