Things Come & Go : The Story of Flappy Bird

I guess you’ve all heard about the mobile app Flappy Bird. The game involves tapping your device's screen to propel a small bird through a series of strategically placed pipes. The app – with Super Nintendo-style graphics – itself was simple but so frustrating and endless. A game you can barely play for more than a few seconds without throwing your phone across the room in frustration. Despite that, Flappy bird became a global phenomenon and took over the web, only in just a few weeks.

History

The game was designed and built by Dong Nguyen, a developer who lives in Vietnam.

• It all began in November 2012, when Nguyen shared an image of a game he was working on via Twitter. 5 month later, he shared the first splash screen for the new iOS game, called Flap Flap. A month goes by with no update on Flap Flap. It turns out that there was already another app in the App Store with that same name Flap Flap. And Flappy Bird was born…

• The game made its App Store debut on May 24, 2013.

• On Sept. 2013, Nguyen released his first update to Flappy Bird. It fixed a few bugs, and he added a new icon for iOS 7. The app did not initially make a huge dent in the download charts. But suddenly, Flappy Bird entered the “Family” category. A few days later, Flappy Bird made its first appearance on Twitter aside from Nguyen's initial tweets. The game continued to rise in popularity. It became known for its difficulty – a challenge which smartphone users found irresistible – and the number of players began to  increase.

• On Dec. 11, he mentioned there would come an Android version of the app.

• From then on, Twitter users started to tweet more about the game and were creating memes related to their frustrations. Nguyen retweeted some of the more humorous images:

• On jan. 10, the app became a top-10 app in the United states, which is a major milestone. Within one week, it became the most downloaded app on Google Play.

• BUT Flappy Bird’s success and the received attention Nguyen got, was impacting his life for the worse. Nguyen began receiving abusive messages, hate tweets and death threats, from users. He was called an ‘evil genius’ for developing such a devilish game. Other messages were sent with an angrier tone as players became increasingly frustrated.

• Flappy Bird is gone forever because Nguyen couldn’t handle it and the app was just too addictive. His life had become overrun by the success of the game.

“I am sorry ‘Flappy Bird’ users, 22 hours from now, I will take ‘Flappy Bird’ down. I cannot take this anymore. It is not anything related to legal issues. I just cannot keep it anymore. I also don’t sell ‘Flappy Bird’, please don’t ask. And I still make games.”

Popularity

According to Mashable, Flappy Bird is the perfect example of how an app can go viral, thanks to social media and word of mouth. It was the perfect storm of circumstance, luck and viral drive. Nguyen chalked up the game's success to pure luck. He told TechCrunch, "I don't know how my games can be so popular. Most of my players are kids in schools. I would like to thank them for playing my game and sharing it to other people."

The game has had at least 50 million downloads, and amassed nearly 16 million tweets.

You can still play Flappy Bird, when you’ve already downloaded it. So smartphones, included with the Flappy Bird app, could bring in some money!

Source: http://mashable.com/2014/02/10/flappy-bird-story/

Author 
Brett Dufort - Application Inspiration
Student Digital Marketing at Ehsal Management school - ehsaldmc

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