Flappy Bird was released on May 24th, 2013, but it wasn’t until last week that people took notice of the infuriating game which has elements suspiciously similar to Super Mario Bros. This weekend — despite the game earning a reported $50,000 per day from in-app advertisements — Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen pulled the game, stating he “cannot take this anymore.”
Apparently he lacks an understanding of how the internet works, because pulling the game just turned up the pressure. People made death threats. Others tried to cash in on eBay with iPhones pre-loaded with the game. Copycat games flooded the market, include our favorite one, Floppy Doge. (No surprise there. It only took one guy an hour to create a superior Flappy Bird clone.)
Now the paranoid-seeming Dong Nguyen has granted an interview to Forbes in which he says Flappy Bird has “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.”
The circumstances surrounding the interview, conducted in Vietnamese, were as much of a soap opera as his public ruminations about whether to take down the app. The interview with Forbes took place in a hotel in Hanoi, with a strict condition that Forbes not reveal Nguyen’s face. It was delayed several hours, in part because Nguyen had a sudden meeting with Vietnam’s deputy prime minister Vu Duc Dam – a remarkable turn of events for someone unknown a week ago. […] The 29-year-old, who sports a close-cropped haircut, appeared stressed. He smoked several cigarettes over the course of the 45-minute interview, and doodled monkey heads on a pad of paper.
Sounds like one of those three pack, eighty-seven monkey head sorts of days. We’ve all been there.
The internet isn’t slowing down with scrutinizing Nguyen and his product, of course. One of our favorite reactions so far was this GIF set:
Additionally, Nick Douglas of Slacktory created this explanation for the game’s deletion.
Flappy Bird also inspired a catchy song from Johnathan Mann of Song A Day.
Hat tip to VG247, Tastefully Offensive, and Laughing Squid.