Have you seen the bird with thick lips, which looks really heavy, that can’t fly on its own? Tap to flap was its line to be able to go through the spaces of the tubes from above and below. That game which has a weird looking bird that keeps on making people curse themselves when it got itself bumped with the tubes, is called the Flappy Bird. In May, Dong Nguyen uploaded a new game to the iOS App Store. It was just one of the hundreds of apps added to Apple’s iTunes marketplace each day. Nguyen had created a simple game in which the player controls a funny-looking bird by tapping the screen, and it needed a simple name. He called it Flap Flap, until he realized another app had the same title. Luckily, developing and updating games on the App Store is such a fast, iterative process that he was able to quickly retitle it Flappy Bird. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. This game was very common to most teenagers where in they waste time just to be in high score. It was very viral that became the next Angry Birds and next Temple Run. Months after he released it, Flappy Bird shot to the top of the charts, drawing even more players, which made it even more popular, which drew in even more players. Millions of people were downloading Flappy Bird at its peak, and Nguyen was raking in $50,000 a day from the pop-up ads that appeared during gameplay. The concept of the game is just very simple: You tap the screen to make the bird fly, release to dive down and contrive through the gaps of the green tubes that was styled after those of the Super Mario series. The gaps were appealingly wide, many times the height of the bird. But because the bird moved so fast and dove up and down so quickly, makes it very more challenging. Because you get just one point for each pipe cleared, your high score is likely to be in single digits, if not zero. The game was aggravating, but addictive. When the New Year sets in, it became the most popular free app in the world. It was just this month that I also grew fond of this application. Though I happen not to download it, it was also very famous. You will just hear its ringtone that sounds every time your score adds up. If you look at it, you can say it’s really easy but when you try it yourself, only a few taps on the screen then you’ll just notice that Flappy bird is touching the ground. This infuriating game was garnering more varied reactions and passionate discussions than any iOS game in recent memory. Through it all, Nguyen found himself under an increasingly bright spotlight. At first, he seemed to be handling the attention with cheerful aplomb. He tweeted back-and-forth endlessly with fans on Twitter, and was unperturbed whenever people sent him less-than-friendly messages. Before long, the negative attention of Flappy Bird started to block out the positive reactions. Flappy Bird continues to hold top 1 on the App Store that brought increasingly unpleasant online harassment and also death threats. A lot also said that they hated this game and even accused the maker of copying the art of Nintendo sprites. While the gaming press piled on to find fault with Flappy Bird‘s mechanics, other app developers tried to advance the idea that Flappy Bird‘s success was ill-gotten. They believed Nguyen had used “bots” — virtual iOS devices used to juice an app’s download numbers and get it onto the charts artificially — to get his games played, in violation of Apple’s terms of service. Weeks passed, Nguyen had gone from confident to unsure to depressed. He calls it his success but it also ruined his simple life. Until he confirmed of pulling off the application that prompted a mad rush of downloading it before it happens. And his deletion of the game on the App Store only increased the attention and harassment directed towards him. So the answer to why Nguyen shut down and pulled his game might just be that he genuinely wants people to leave him alone and stop playing Flappy Bird. It made way to the clones of the said app that can be freely downloaded. Like others who became famous overnight, Dong Nguyen learned that success is rather like a game of Flappy Bird: The forces pulling you down are just as strong as the ones pulling you up, and either one can cause you to crash sooner than you expect. He’d soared briefly and came down hard, rather like the little bird he created.
