Flappy Bird
One of the most memorable stories in my last decade of covering gaming was when Flappy Bird creator, Dong Nguyen, announced one day that he was deleting the game entirely. This was at the height of its peak, with millions of players earning him millions in revenue. The famed tweet:
Now, for the first time since 2017, Nguyen has returned to Twitter to disown the upcoming, resurrected version of Flappy Bird that is acting like it was transferred from him to a new “passionate” community trying to keep the game alive. But even a cursory amount of digging reveals that this entire endeavor is somehow rooted in cryptocurrency, and now Nguyen is confirming what everyone suspected, that he has nothing to do with it, and did not facilitate it happening:
He’s also saying he didn’t sell it, which echoes the recent findings that the company that is now running Flappy Bird appears to have simply scooped up the lapsed trademark which Nguyen never bothered to renew. If he nuked the game, why would he bother? But that took ages to actually expire.
Exactly what is going to happen with this zombified version of Flappy Bird is unclear, but digging through data and files has revealed things like different birds, loot boxes, and the idea that this is some sort of crypto play by the company involved. From a page on their website about the new Flappy Bird:
“The legendary Flappy Bird is back and will fly higher than ever on Solana as it soars into Web 3.0. Artists, developers and creators can build, play and earn from the legendary Flappy Bird IP.”
So yeah, it’s crypto, it’s NFTs and everyone is so annoyed by this almost every tweet of the resurrected Twitter account has even been community noted revealing its crypto ties and snapping up of Nguyen’s trademark.
In short, there’s nothing to see here. The game may indeed exist again and you can flap along with new birds and new levels or whatever, but it has some sort of crypto tie in and zero relation to the famed Dong Nguyen who actually came out of a seven year hibernation to distance himself from this. Despite my relentless covering of the explosive success of the first game, I will not be going near t his one at all.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.