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Flappy Bird app disappears mysteriously
Quotable
Posted: Sunday, February 23, 2014 8:07 pm
The game seems so simple: tap the screen of your phone to keep a small yellow, blue or red bird from hitting the Mario-esque pipes. Every time you clear a pipe, you get a point. But, as simple as it seems, it proves to be quite a challenge, even for those with scores of over 100.
“The game was like five minutes long and it took me about 100 tries,” Emmy Khan, a sophomore dietetics major, said. Her high score is 110.
Flappy Bird was released in May 2013 by Vietnamese game developer Dong Nguyen through. GEARS Studios but didn’t become popular until Jan. 2014. It went viral after word spread about its difficulty and in January the game topped the Free Apps charts.
Some frustrated players took to the App Store to post some creative reviews, trying in vain to warn other players against downloading the game. The pleas did not go unnoticed by Nguyen, who later took the game down.
“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 in an interview with Forbes.
It seems that the majority of Flappy Bird players find the game anything but relaxing.
“It’s just so aggravating,” Alex Maben, a sophomore media arts and design and English double major, said. “It seems so simple. The fact that I can’t do it almost seems like an insult. How hard can it be to get a stupid bird through some pipes by tapping a screen?”
It was these types of comments that pushed Nguyen to remove the game from the App Store and Google Play.
He later took to Twitter to explain. “I can call Flappy Bird a success of mine. But it also ruins my simple life. So now I hate it,” Nguyen tweeted. “I am sorry Flappy Bird users, 22 hours from now, I will take Flappy Bird down. I cannot take this anymore.”
Nguyen stayed true to his word and removed Flappy Bird from the App Store on Feb. 9, 2014, which prevents new users from downloading and playing the game. Some people with the app still loaded on their phone have even gone as far as putting it up for sale on eBay, one as expensive as $12,000.
“It ought to be simple, but it’s not. That’s why it’s so addicting. You want to prove that you can ‘beat’ the stupid thing, if that’s possible,” Maben said.
Some people were able to ignore the hype surrounding the game. Joseph Kuykendall, a sophomore media arts and design major, understands the hype surrounding the game although he has never tried the game and never plans to.
“I understand where it comes from, because I myself am a part of the Candy Crush addiction — which in a sense is very similar,” Kuykendall said. “I didn’t get involved with Flappy Bird because I knew it would be another waste of time.”
But not everyone sees Flappy Bird the same way.
“Flappy Bird is too simple of a concept to not try to be the best in,” Khan said. She claims that she’ll never delete the app from her phone.
Despite the efforts of Nguyen to squash the addiction, it seems that Flappy Bird will continue to soar across phone screens for a long time to come.
Contact Lauren Hunt at huntle@dukes.jmu.edu.
copied from: http://www.breezejmu.org/life/article_17567b54-9cf0-11e3-a025-0017a43b2370.html
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further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flappy_Bird
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