Chapter 325: Flappy Bird

How do you take a simple flapping bird and turn it into a phenomenal rage fest?

Well, there's nothing much you can do except make Flappy Bird available to the whole world.

Even Dong Nguyen, the game's developer, never expected things to be as it is.

He was like any other Super Mario Bros. player-turned-developer out there.

He played the game, got addicted and loved it, tried his way into coding, and the rest is video game developer history...

For Nguyen, however, his video game developer history was about to get tumultuous...

If anything, he was a simple guy that wanted simple things.

He was so into simplicity that he found popular mobile games such as Angry Birds to be too complicated.

Of course, as a whole, Nguyen found contemporary Western games to be overly complex to his liking.

His own game development company, .Gears, follows his simple beliefs. The belief that everything should be pure and incredibly fun to play.

Even his first video game, Shuriken Block, was about as simple as it can be.

Block shurikens from hitting people by tapping these shurikens as they appear. Three lives were allotted and every shurikened person was a lost life.

That was that.

But not really...

After all, Nguyen wanted to go even simpler.

With this vision, he wanted to make a simpler game for people who are always on the move. A mobile game for a mobile game per se.

In two to three days, Flappy Bird was made and he even recycled the main bird character, Flabby, from one of his canceled platformer games.

The gameplay was inspired by the act of bouncing a ping-pong ball against a paddle for as long as possible.

Initially, the first game iteration was significantly easier than what it became for the final version, however, Nguyen found that version to be boring and subsequently tightened up the difficulty.

With a few tweaks from here and there, the game became a side-scroller where the player controls a bird, attempting to fly between columns of green pipes without hitting them.

It was the perfect mobile game.

You could learn to play it in less than 30 seconds but it could take hours and even days to get skilled at it.

The average player could barely get a score higher than the tens.

So it was perfect for commuting or waiting in line.

It was completely free... like most mobile games out there.

And it even had nostalgic Super Mario Bros. graphics...

Nguyen had a home run with this one... but it was an achievement that took some time to register.

After all, just like its gameplay, Flappy Bird's market performance had a floppy start.

Almost no downloads for months just as how it takes quite a while to master.

However, when it did find its groove, it just kept flapping...

The game really flapped its way to success... but also pitfalls and controversies.

Nguyen's idea of simplicity did have its merits but it ultimately still turned into a mess.

Kicking things off with reviews of Flappy Bird being as mixed as it is.

With Nolan Bushnell, the creator of the video game Pong, compared Flappy Bird to his own game by claiming that "simple games are more satisfying". For a game made to be simple, this must have stung Nguyen hard.

Even someone like John Romero, the co-creator of the classic first-person shooter Doom, commented that Flappy Bird is a reaction against prevailing design, the way grunge was a reaction to metal.

Mass media didn't stop the hate as the game was described to be an insanely irritating, difficult, and frustrating game that combines a super-steep difficulty curve with bad, boring graphics and jerky movement!

For something that's supposedly a simple game, Flappy Bird's difficulty clearly became a source of ire for many users, with one user stating that it took him half an hour to achieve a score of five points.

Its gameplay really made it an addictive short-term distraction for the casual skill and score-obsessed players.

It was as addictive as it was shallow. People even considered it more addictive than the most addictive illegal substances out there.

Without a doubt, this addictive perception really gets warped a lot, to the point that Nguyen decided to take the game out of availability.

"Flappy Bird was designed to play in a few minutes when you are relaxed. But it happened to 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 said that the guilt that he felt over the game was affecting his sleep and that his conscience was relieved after he took down the game.

But even with the game down... it will still keep haunting the poor fellow.

It had to be said that he was always getting death threats and requests to take down the game. When he finally took it down, the death threats and requests to put it back up were present even more so.

Setting aside the whole phone-downloaded-with-Flappy-Bird becoming pricy, other conspiracies popped up.

With most popular being about Flappy Bird's removal has been due to legal challenges from Nintendo over perceived visual similarities to the Mario games.

This had been a long time coming.

With the open use of Mario-style graphics as homage, it didn't take long for it to be referred to as "ripped-off art".

The most obvious green pipe obstacle is considered "a new albeit unoriginal design".

These allegations were denied by Nintendo spokesmen but most of the general public still believes this legal conundrum to have happened. Nintendo is known to be an infringement and lawsuit hog, after all.

Of course, aside from this Mario rip-off allegation, Flappy Bird was also called out as a rip-off of other games like Piou Piou vs. Cactus and Helicopter.

On the topic of Flappy Bird being a clone... poor Flappy Bird became cloned as well.

Since the game's removal, numerous remakes and parodies have been spawned, such as Sesame Street's Flappy Bert and Fall Out Boy's Fall Out Bird.

Ironically, Flappy Bird became one of the most cloned games in Apple's App Store. At the peak of its popularity, over 60 clones per day were appearing on the App Store, prompting both Google and Apple to begin rejecting games with the word "Flappy" in the name. CNET reviewed seven "Flappy copycats" for iOS two days after the original game's removal, describing the options as "pretty bleak", but singling out the underwater Splashy Fish as the closest approximation of Flappy Bird.

What's even worse was that these available imitators on alternative app stores have been found to contain malware that can lead to unauthorized charges to a user's phone bills.

Poor simple Dong Nguyen just can't catch a break! He's had other non-Flappy Bird endeavors but the trauma of these flappy turn of events must still haunt him so.

His supposedly simple game just unwittingly plunged his simple life into chaos that he was never prepared for.

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It really makes one wonder... what's even going on with Alexander's mind to make him decide to plunder such an accursed game as his own?

Wasn't Nguyen's experience a cautionary tale for game developers to stay away from games like Flappy Bird?

It can't be because he wanted to share his simple but tense Oscar outing, can it?

Well... Alexander, almost always, has his reasons.

It's not that he didn't have enough reason to pass on it. It's more on the fact that he has no reason to do so.

Since Flappy Bird was a success, he just needed to look into the positive and mitigate the negative.

As for the Oscar winners, losers, and their implications... Alexander didn't put any more heed to it.

His focus was more on his next endeavor and moving forward.

Granted, his way of moving forward was in a flappy way.

Not with Flappy Bird but with Flappy Birds.