Farewell to Flappy Bird

We’ve all seen random people walking around campus, tapping at their phones furiously while hoping to reach a new high score in the new hit game Flappy Bird. The simple game involving a little bird as it flaps its way through green tubes reminiscent of Mario skyrocketed to the top of the app store after lying dormant for eight months. The creator, Dong Nguyen, initially released it for download on May 24, 2013. Unfortunately (or fortunately), it was recently taken off the App Store after Dong Nguyen said on his Twitter: “I cannot take this anymore.”The game, if you haven’t played it already, is very simple; all you have to do is tap the screen every time you want the bird to jump in order to guide it through as many green pipes as possible. However, the uniqueness of Flappy Bird is the insane difficulty of actually accomplishing this feat, since precise timing and quick reaction times are needed. My current high score is 78, though there are many people I know who have three-digit high scores, and they have spent many hours perfecting their technique in flapping the bird’s wings.To briefly illustrate just how popular this game is, Nguyen told tech site The Verge that he was earning up to $50,000 a day from ad revenue, and after the app was taken down, phones with Flappy Bird already installed fetched up to $ 99,000 on eBay (which is completely pointless because the downloaded copy of Flappy Bird is linked to the original owner’s account, thus you cannot play the game unless you have the username and password of the original owner). As a indie game developer based in Vietnam, he was making (and probably is still making) a lot more than the average Vietnamese citizen, along with global fame and recognition that many may consider as a “miracle."The fact that somebody would take down a game that has proven to be so valuable just because they couldn’t take the publicity seems suspicious to me. He seems to be saying “I can’t handle publicity” to the world in order to get as much publicity as possible. Furthermore, it’s extremely difficult to actually get rid of all of the attention that he got from the game. He wouldn’t suddenly become a nobody again who makes simple but difficult games on the App Store.Moreover, besides removing the game from the various application stores, Nguyen hasn’t really tried anything else to get out of the spotlight. In fact, on his Twitter handle, he said, “I still make games” and is conversing with his followers. If Nguyen really wanted to try to leave the public eye, why didn’t he take off his other games, Super Ball Juggling and Shuriken Block, too? Those two games are still racking up thousands of downloads on application stores, and it’s not like the public and media are totally unaware that Nguyen exists and aren’t talking about him at all.With the removal of Flappy Bird, a lot of mimicked games which involve a similar mechanic have appeared on various application stores, but they haven’t been nearly as popular or interesting as the original. I know I’m still playing a lot of Flappy Bird to kill time, and I see lots of my friends doing the same. Honestly, I think that Nguyen should just bring the game back to application stores and stop trying the cheap deception of being fed up with publicity. The ads would still make him $50,000 a day, and of course, as an added bonus, he’d get some more publicity.