What happened to the creator of Flappy Bird, a very popular and addictive game?

Dong Nguyen created a mobile game nearly a decade ago that caught the world’s attention.

If you haven’t lived in a cave or are not yet familiar with video games, you probably remember the existence of Flappy Bird. a title for mobile devices with tremendous success A few months after its launch in May 2013. Today we want to tell you what happened to him and why he disappeared from our lives despite being one of the atypical phenomena that occur from time to time in the industry.
To tell you this story, you must start by getting to know the heroes of the story. The real culprit for this Dong Nguyen is a Vietnamese programmer and artist Who is the author of Flappy Bird (originally called Flap Flap). He and only he is guilty for creating one of the games that are so simple, it has become one of the most addictive on iOS and Android.

Flappy Bird suggested we consider a side-scrolling hierarchical yellow bird. very basic mechanic but high difficulty. We touched the touch screen of our smartphone with one finger and made this bird rise a little and fall again with its wings. Aim? We’ve added a point to the leaderboard for every obstacle we’ve cleared, smashing through huge and familiar pipes that we’re making our way through without contact.

With that starting point and no apparent depth, the game was laid out in early 2014 as follows: Most downloaded option in App Store and Play Store. This was mainly because it was a free-to-access game, but Flappy Bird contained ads that were frequently shown to us when we died: what was designed as another monetization system to make the game profitable. it was a nightmare for its creatorwho was absolutely overwhelmed by the situation.

The video game made money from the outside, but that wasn’t Nguyen’s main concern. Yes, the game made him extremely rich, especially about $50,000 a day According to information from The Verge, it’s between the two platforms it’s available on. But there was something else that prevented him from sleeping: addiction caused byin some cases it reached morbid levels.

His conscience was so heavy that he decided to take action on it and withdraw the game from stores for your mental health. “Flappy Bird is designed to be played for a few minutes when you’re comfortable,” Dong Nguyen said in an interview with Forbes. Said. “But it has become an addictive product. I think it has become a problem, and to solve it, It is best to kill Flappy Bird. It’s gone forever”.

The Vietnamese programmer continued to earn revenue from those who downloaded it to their devices, as his ads continued to be shown to these users, but could not bear the fact that he was malicious. creating a feeling of addiction to more and more players, some emailed him, equating his degree of addiction with that of some drugs. In addition, other creators accused him of using bots to increase reviews, and several users insulted him for the difficulty of the game.

“I wanted to create a game that you can enjoy comfortably for ten minutes on the subway, not a monster you can spend hours playing with,” Nguyen said on another occasion. “I’d call Flappy Bird a success in itself. But it’s also ruined my simple life. Now I hate it,” he wrote in a message posted on his personal profile. excitement.

Since it was removed from the game on February 10, 2014, lots of Flappy Bird clones spawned It’s available on both the App Store and Play Store, and some even made it run with less than 20 lines of code, showing how easy it is to program the game, another proof that sometimes you just have to hit the key and know how to execute it is a good idea.

They showed how easy it was to program by running the game with less than 20 lines of code.The effect was such that we saw many references to the game in different areas. Computer science education nonprofit Code.org offered a series of tutorials that allowed students to create their own Flappy Birds, and even Google didn’t forget about it in the years that followed. Android’s Lollipop version included an easter egg In a similar game format that users can play, lollipops instead of pipes and Android robot replacing the bird and one of the Doodles of the Year put the game alongside other 2014 phenomena like Football World Cup or Ice. Aquarius Challenge.

As for its creator, it is worth noting that. Dong Nguyen continued to make video gamesand it actually launched Swing Copters for mobile in August of the same year, confident that its popularity and good work as a developer will be enough for the game to work well, but without reaching the extremes of Flappy Bird. He succeeded. In 2017 he introduced us to another addictive and challenging game called Ninja Spinki Challenges, but it has since disappeared from social media and none of .Gears’ (the name he gave his studio) similar projects have come close to the worldwide Flappy phenomenon. Bird. This is remembered to this day as one of those cases of sudden success that surprised developers who just wanted it, without wanting or drinking. make video games and keep living your life Quietly and calmly, without a simple 2D modeling of a yellow bird that just flaps its wings and hurts its presence.