There have been addictive games and then there has been a flappy bird, the most addictive of them all. Flappy bird has been one of the most famous and addictive games that have ever been played. The game was so addictive that finally, it had to be removed from the play store because people spent hours every day playing it. They left school, jobs chores to play it.
The Flappy Bird Game
Flappy bird was one of the easiest and lightweight games ever. Created by Vietnamese developer Dong Nguyen in less than 48 hours, it was a side-scroller where your character was a bird and you had to navigate it forward through the gaps in the pipe dodging them. To do this you would have to tap the screen. Each tap would make the bird jump one position forward and no taps would make it fall down. You can watch the gameplay below.
This game was heavily inspired by the game-play of Copter, a game that was usually found in Chinese feature phones.
Fame & Controversies
Flappy Bird was the controversy’s own child. Initially launched in May 2013, the game didn’t see any popularity until January 2014 when it saw a sudden boom and people got hooked on to it. There was news of people spending days doing nothing but trying to get a good score on a flappy bird. It became the most downloaded app ever on the IOS app store beating Angry Birds.
This resulted in more and more people trying the game and all of a sudden there was news of people being fired from their jobs due to being too addicted to it. The game also used characters and graphics which very closely resembled that of Super Mario. So the developer also got into legal issues regarding that.
Revenue & Taken Down
Since it was ruling the charts in both Android and Apple stores, the game which used in-app advertisements was making $50,000 daily. The game ran like this for the whole of January before being taken out of App market. This could have brought a total of $15,000,000 worth of revenue.
But due to too many controversies, the developer finally decided to take the app down.
It’s Impact
The flappy bird had a big impact on many upcoming apps as well as other things. We got a flappy bird themed game in the android easter egg right from Lollipop 5.0 till the latest ones. Flappy Bird inspired over a hundred clones that went on to become decent hits themselves. Today if you plan on learning game development, a lot of these tutorials begin with designing a flappy bird game.
So this was the rise and fall of the flappy bird game, sadly you will not find it on the play store. However, you can download the apk from here. Alternatively, you can play it on your web browser via this link.
