Tap. Tap-tap. Tap. Dink, Thud! Ok, start again, and the the cycle continues along after a brief moment of frustration. Recently hitting 50 million downloads, Flappy Bird is a viral mobile game that students are quickly picking up. The objective of the game is simple, players tap an 8-bit chubby yellow bird to maneuver through spaces between green Mario-like pipes.
The game was developed by Vietnamese Dong Nguyen, and his dotGame studio, and uploaded onto the App Store in May. According to its download history, it was not until mid-November that the game started getting downloads, but by late January, Flappy Bird reached the #1 free downloaded spot on the App Store in 50 countries.
According to The Verge, Nguyen said that he only put around two to three days towards developing the game, and has spend no effort to market it. He attributes the game’s success due to its ease in picking it up as well as allowing for simple competition between friends.
“People in the same classroom can play and compete easily because Flappy Bird is simple to learn, but you need skill to get a high score,” Nguyen said.
Nguyen said that he makes $50,000 a day from ads when the game is played.
Freshman Reilly Leet said that he was one of the first people to start playing it at the school.
“It’s very addicting, it’s so fun to beat your high score, and once you do, you keep on trying to beat it again,” Leet said. “It’s also fun to show off in front of your friends and beat their scores.”
Leet said that he found out about the game by looking through the top free apps on the App Store.
Senior Harrison Friedes said that the challenging difficulty of the game compels him to play it.
“The game has a steep learning curve, but can get to be pretty enjoyable afterwards,” Senior Harrison Friedes said. “My high score is 120, so I feel pretty good about it.”
Friedes said that he picked up the game after being challenged by his sister.
“She bet me I couldn’t beat her score of 19, so obviously I had to take up that challenge,” Friedes said.
Freshman Mitchell Argue also finds the game’s challenging difficulty as the main reason to play it.
“It’s fun because it’s the most frustrating game I’ve ever played,” Argue said. “It’s unfair and often glitches out which is annoying, but I’ve managed a high score of 60.”
Mitchell said that he caught wind of the game because everybody else was playing it too.
Junior Apryl Hsu said that she found out about the game on Tumblr.
“It’s fun, but I get poopy and annoyed and frustrated when the bird clearly dies on me,” Hsu said.
Senior Chloe Jiang said that the game’s constant challenge is what makes it so addicting.
“When I first started playing, I kept dying and that’s what invoked me to keep playing,” Jiang said.
Other students are not too impressed by the game.
“The game isn’t fun,” Junior Kieran Baack said. “It makes you think you’re having a good time by pitting you against your friends.”
Sophomore Stuart Ashford said that many other games are very similar to Flappy Bird, but do not reach such a high level of popularity due to lack of interest.
“It’s a revival of a common never-ending challenge in games like Temple Rush,” Ashford said. “It’s a theme that seems to be really constant among popular mobile games.”
According to The Verge Nguyen removed the game from Apple and Google app stores on Feb. 9. Twenty two hours earlier, Nguyen tweeted a warning of the removal saying that the media attention was disrupting his life. His tweet was retweeted 120,000 times, and after the announcement, Google search data even indicated that more people searched about Flappy Bird than Justin Bieber’s arrest. Some iPhones with Flappy Bird installed are being sold at upwards of $900 on eBay.
Junior Carson Armstrong said that he feels sad about the removal.
“Flappy Bird was an important game in my life” Armstrong said. “It’s almost as if a part of me is missing.”
Junior Jason Hua also said that the removal makes him sad because he cannot bring the game to other people.
“Now I can’t tell some of my friends to play it,” Hua said.
