The Story of Flappy Bird

With the spread of smartphones and tablets, mobile games have also peaked. There is bound to be a favorite mobile game that many people play for their free time. Among them was a prominent mobile game, Flappy Bird. Even though the original game was removed from the app stores years ago, we know that there are still users who tremble when they hear the name Flappy Bird.

Flappy Bird was so addictive when it was released, and the number of people who successfully played the game was so small that even psychologists started talking about the game. Although Flappy Bird was a huge success and made a lot of money for its developer, it suddenly disappeared. So, what happened that the game that tied these millions to itself suddenly disappeared?

The Launch of Flappy Bird

The developer of the Flappy Bird mobile game is Dong Nguyen, a Vietnamese programmer born in 1985. Dong Nguyen started coding at the age of 16 and trained as a software developer in his country. After interning and working in different software companies for a while, he decided to develop a different game.

Dong Nguyen, who grew up playing Super Mario, developed the Flappy Bird game in a few days based on the bird image he had previously made for a different game and published it with DotGEARS Studios. When Flappy Bird first aired, the dates were May 2013. Yet success was quite far away.

Flappy Bird Revenue & Popularity

No one knew when Flappy Bird was first released. The game, which did not receive attention for months, started to become popular after being reviewed in a video by Swedish YouTuber PewDiePie. When the dates showed January of 2014, the Flappy Bird mobile game had an unprecedented success.

• Flappy Bird Revenue: $50,000 a day, $18 million a year 
• Total more than 90 million downloads
• More than 68 thousand comments.
• App Store and Google Play Store first rank in 53 countries

Even if we are seeing some similar successes now, these numbers were unbelievable for that time period. It is possible to say that almost the whole world was talking about this game at that time, when it comes to the reviews on the game, the news in the press, and criticism. 

Also Read: App Download Statistics (2021)

What made Flappy Bird so popular?

First of all, Flappy Bird was completely free. The revenue it earned for its developer came from in-game ads. The game size was extremely low and could easily run on all devices. It was extremely simple to play and even a small child could figure out how it worked after trying the game for a few seconds.

The developer of the game, Dong Nguyen, set the game’s boot time to 7 milliseconds. So Flappy Bird was designed for everyone to play easily. Not to mention that the main character, the bird, is extremely cute, the simple graphics remind people of the arcade, and the green pipes in the game remind us the Super Mario game.

Apart from these conveniences and charms, the biggest reason why the game became popular was that it was scratching our ambition. We were all mad that we couldn’t play more than 10 seconds in such an easy game. According to reviews, a standard user could take about 200 attempts and last for a maximum of 15 seconds.

Naturally, people started to compete with each other through this attractive game. You may remember at that time, such posts were made on all social media platforms. However, this rivalry started to turn from entertainment to addiction, and especially parents argued that this game should be banned.

What happened to Flappy Bird?

While Flappy Bird was such a huge success and earned its developer thousands of dollars a day, it was suddenly removed from all mobile app stores in February 2014. The Flappy Bird mobile game had literally disappeared.

After this unexpected event, many rumors came one after another, such as that the developer was killed, lawsuits were filed on his behalf, and the game was removed with a court decision. However, none of this was true. The answer was simple, Dong Nguyen, a young software developer at the time, could not stand the pressures and the voice of his conscience.

Dong Nguyen was cursed every day, lynched and pressured on social media by people and families who were addicted to the game. In the end, he could not stand it and eliminated the game. Dong Nguyen said that he never imagined that people would become addicted like this, he never planned anything like that, and he wanted to develop a game that users would only play for a few minutes in their spare time.

After the game was removed, smartphones with Flappy Bird installed began to be sold over the internet. There were even those who bought these phones valued at thousands of dollars. However, the popular shopping site eBay removed the listings for phones with Flappy Bird on the grounds that this rule was violated because it required that second-hand phones be reset before being sold.

How to play Flappy Bird online?

The original Flappy Bird game developed by Dong Nguyen and published by DotGEARS Studios is currently not available on any mobile app store or APK site. However, it is possible to find many similar mobile games.

If you want to play the original Flappy Bird game, there is a website that you can play on your computer via the link here. Of course, we cannot say that playing on the computer gives the old pleasure, but those who want to go back to the old days can give it a chance.