Flappy Bird was almost preposterously simple. If you ever played the game, even once, you surely remember how it worked, but here’s a summary just in case. You were a bird. Your job was to fly, left to right, for as long as possible without crashing into the green Mario-ish pipes coming from both the top and bottom of the screen. Tap the screen to go up, stop tapping to go down. That’s it. That’s the game.
Nobody, not even Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen, thought those were the ingredients for a smash hit. And yet for a few weeks in 2014, the game was at the top of app stores everywhere — and became something of a cultural phenomenon. Almost as soon as it took off, though, players began to rebel, annoyed at both the punishing difficulty of the game and the sudden riches it was bringing its developer. Things got so bad, so quickly, that at the peak of its popularity Nguyen did the unthinkable: he simply removed the game from stores.
For this episode of Version History, we dust off our tapping fingers and dig into the story of Flappy Bird. David Pierce, Jake Kastrenakes, and Game File’s Stephen Totilo discuss the game’s extremely simple beginnings, its nearly unexplainable explosion in popularity, its clone-filled legacy, and the controversy that changed Nguyen’s life forever. Both Totilo and The Verge figure fairly prominently in the story, and we all have a lot to think about (and maybe answer for). The Flappy Bird story isn’t even technically over — there’s still a game by that name that you can play, at least in a few places — but it basically ended almost as soon as it began.
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And if you want to relive the story of Flappy Bird, even though you can’t technically play the original anymore, here are a few links to get you started:
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