Are you a hipster attempting to recapture the flair of SNES gaming? Or perhaps a 14-year-old who thinks retro graphics appeal to a simpler time that you can’t remember? Then you may be aware of the hit game Flappy Bird. For the rest of us, let me explain.
Flappy Bird, created by .GEARS Studios(a small Hanoi-based game developer) has overwhelmed your news feeds, RSS supplies and game related content articles over the last week. The controversy stems from the games developer, Nguyen Ha Dong, pulling it unceremoniously from the App Store and Google Play store at the height of its popularity. Why? Currently, we have only the twitter feeds from the eccentric creator to go on, but a few assumptions can be made.
Let’s rewind briefly and address the question: what is this game? Flappy Bird is a 2D, side-scrolling mobile game that artfully “borrows” its main graphics from Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. You play a small bird whose only mission in life is to fly through a series of openings between pipes, unendingly, until you die. Fun right? Yet, the addictive nature of the game and the ability to compete with friends for flapping superiority quickly boosted it to the top of the App and Google Play stores.
Yep, this is about how far I get every time.
Although it’s not exactly game of the year candidate, credit is due. Flappy Bird is free and supported completely by ad revenue. The game was never meant to be the next Angry Birds, but a simple game for some quick entertainment. Its success was as much of a surprise to the inventor as to the rest of us.
Suddenly, the 29-year old inventor Dong Nguyen awoke to a daily revenue stream of $50,000. In ad revenue, people, not sales download. Needless to say, he was a bit shocked. “I am sorry ‘Flappy Bird’ users, 22 hours from now, I will take ‘Flappy Bird’ down. I cannot take this anymore,” Dong Tweeted. “It is not anything related to legal issues. I just cannot keep it anymore.”
The it he’s referring to is the massive amount of emails, complaints, death threats and general craziness that tends to come with that type of money; because while nice people will certainly download and play your game, crazy ones will yell loudly about it. Dong is the sole creator and operator of the game; it’s that simple and insane.
This is not him, but I imagine he made a similar face.
So the world awoke one morning to find it gone, and the craziness that’s ensued is the stuff of video game legends. Petitions, more threats and even copies of Flappy Bird selling on eBay for thousands of dollars have swept mobile game users up in a tide of crazy.
Yet, why? Sure, the game is addicting, but that describes many solid games. The appeal is classic and controls are incredibly simple. It’s well made for parties and easy enough a small dog could do it if smart phone manufacturers would just design for their paws already.
But does it deserve this level of insanity? That’s for you to decide. For those in the know, the game is already safely seated on your phones removable storage where you can lavish attention on it for the rest of your life. For those outside of the loop though, you may have missed your chance to be apart of one of the weirdest gaming phenomenon to come around in years.
