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Riley MacLeod
It’s legitimately possible you’re too young to remember the whole thing about Flappy Bird, a short-lived 2013 mobile game that was pulled by its creator Dong Nguyen in February 2014, around eight months after release. Now the game is coming back via The Flappy Bird Foundation, who bill themselves as “a new team of passionate fans committed to sharing the game with the world,” and who appear to have crypto ties and have scooped up Nguyen’s trademark. It’s basically what you’d expect from 2024.
Flappy Bird was a free mobile game where you steered a little bird between some pipes, amassing points until you inevitably crashed. It was a simple premise; as IGN wrote in their review, “Flappy Bird isn't a good video game. It's arguably not even a fun one. But its no-frills approach and exacting, relentlessly repetitious gameplay make it an addictive short-term distraction for the skill and score-obsessed.” Though released in May 2013, it hit its peak in early 2014, when everyone was playing it and freaking out about how much they were playing it, garnering 50 million downloads and reportedly earning creator Nguyen $50k a day in advertizing. For some, its simplicity made it a brilliant experiment in game design. For others, it was emblematic of everything wrong with mobile games: derivative in its visual associations with Mario and Angry Birds, about nothing but score-chasing, fearfully addictive at a time when game addiction had been less studied. As CNET wrote of it at the time, “There is little else as substantive and convincing as Flappy Bird that the smartphone era has driven us to the cliff of insanity when it comes to compulsive behavior, contracting attention spans, and a desire to succeed at something arbitrary and meaningless.”
If Flappy Bird touched on the worst aspects of mobile gaming, it also touched on the worst aspects of the internet. Players–fans and haters alike–harangued then-unknown, solo creator Nguyen about the game’s difficulty, about whether it infringed on Nintendo, about what the press wrote about him and his game, about the fact that the game was successful. The Wall Street Journal wrote that Nguyen had to avoid the internet and had trouble walking down the street in his town of Hanoi without being accosted, and that he’d taken a break from his day job to deal with the Flappy Bird attention, both positive and negative. This was all months before Gamergate kicked off in August 2014, when the idea of harassment driving a developer off the internet hadn’t yet become so depressingly commonplace.
The response to the game led to its own flurry of discourse: to quote people who I hope don't cringe at having their takes from 2014 dragged into the present, Brendan Keogh at Unwinnable defended the game as not a "sneaky, malicious conspiracy to steal everyone’s money or undermine the game system. Just a person – one person – who makes games having some success. But online games culture can’t stand this. We can’t stand a game that doesn’t do something innovative being so successful, so popular, so profitable. How dare it?"
Game designer Robert Yang wrote that “I suspect that if Nguyen were a white American, this would've been the story of a scrappy indie who managed to best Zynga with his loving homage to Nintendo's apparent patent on green pixel pipes and the classic ‘helicopter cave’ game genre.” Yang went on to write, "For many indie game developers, Nguyen reminds us a lot of ourselves. What would happen if we were financially successful? If success is somewhat out of our control, how (or WHY) should we be blamed for it? Why do we have to work so hard to maintain our image and reputation, why can't we just make the games we want to make?"
In February 2014, Nguyen made the decision to pull the game from app stores, tweeting “I am sorry 'Flappy Bird' users, 22 hours from now, I will take 'Flappy Bird' down. I cannot take this anymore.” Nguyen told Forbes that the game had “become an addictive product. I think it has become a problem. To solve that problem, it's best to take down Flappy Bird. It's gone forever." Nguyen received death threats for the decision, the discourse surged–was he sacrificing his fame and fiscal security to save us from ourselves? Had we driven a developer who’d made a hit away from games forever?--some people sold their Flappy Bird-containing phones on eBay, and that was pretty much it.
Until last week, when The Flappy Bird Foundation arrived to announce it would be bringing the game back. Unlike the simplicity of the original, the new Flappy Bird will have different characters and modes, as well as multiplayer and progression; as chief creative Michael Roberts said in the game’s press release, “We are beyond excited to be bringing back Flappy Bird and delivering a fresh experience that will keep players engaged for years to come.” It sounds like a far cry from the simplicity that made the original so compelling, but it’s also all the features you’d expect from a mobile game in 2024. Whether these changes make it antithetical to the original’s magic or whether they solve some of the criticisms that made it so controversial remains to be seen.
Despite the fire with which the original took over everyone’s lives, the return of the game felt to me like it was met at first with indifference. In the decade since Flappy Bird, we’ve been inundated not just with Flappy Bird clones, but with remakes and re-releases of every type of media under the sun–a new Flappy Bird feels like yet another tired IP cash grab. Everything is ephemeral and vanishes, dulling whatever sting fans might still feel about its original disappearance. We’ve also had a decade for internet discourse to carve grooves into our brains and for online harassment to explode, turning the original’s rise and fall into a certain depressing par for the course. To me, Flappy Bird’s enduring legacy is what it meant in a specific time and place in games and on the internet; in some ways, we never left it.
On Sunday, Nguyen tweeted for the first time since 2017, writing of the new game, “No, I have no related [sic] with their game. I did not sell anything. I also don't support crypto.”
The first part of the comment seems to be a reference to how the Foundation apparently acquired the rights to Flappy Bird. The press release explains that “The Flappy Bird Foundation Group and affiliates have acquired the official Flappy Bird trademark rights from Gametech Holdings LLC.” According to IGN, Gametech was able to claim Nguyen had abandoned the Flappy Bird trademark and scoop it up when he failed to reply to notices from the US trademark office. This is not, in itself, nefarious, but it’s disappointing if you were hoping Nguyen was involved, and certainly complicates the Foundation’s narrative about the thrilling return of a beloved game.
The second part of Nguyen’s tweet refers to the game’s connection to crypto: IGN notes that Michael Roberts is the founder of a game company called 1208 Productions, which is behind an NFT cringingly called “Deez.” The Verge points to some digging done by Varun Biniwale, a cybersecurity researcher, who found references to Web 3 in the new Flappy Bird’s website, quotes such as “Artists, developers and creators can build, play and earn from the legendary Flappy Bird IP,” and various crypto people listed in the leaderboards of what appears to be an early prototype of the game. There’s no public-facing indication that the new Flappy Bird will be a crypto or NFT game, but, like the trademark saga above, it complicates any kind of feel-good narrative. And given crypto’s well-earned association with scams, it’s easy to imagine the new Flappy Bird going the same route.
If the drama around the original Flappy Bird defined, or would come to define, 2014, then the new Flappy Bird is exhaustingly definitional of 2024: the unnecessary IP rehashing, the connections to tech grift–the newest thing about this is that AI hasn’t made an appearance yet, though I’ve probably cursed us by saying that. It’s so exactly what you’d expect these days, and that’s to say nothing of what the game will be when it actually releases through the end of this year and 2025. Why Flappy Bird matters feels like a product of its time, and why it matters today does too. |
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