What Happened to Flappy Bird? The Rise, the Removal and What Came After
Published · 2 min read
Flappy Bird was published on the iOS App Store on 24 May 2013 by Dong Nguyen, a developer in Hanoi working alone under the name .GEARS Studios. For most of that year almost nobody downloaded it. Then, over Christmas and January 2014, it climbed the free charts in country after country until it was the number one free app in the US and UK App Stores and on Google Play, with something like fifty million downloads and an advertising income Nguyen put at around fifty thousand dollars a day — from a single banner under the game.
Why it took off
Nobody has a tidy answer. The game was tiny, the art borrowed the look of Super Mario's pipes, and the difficulty was brutal: a score of 10 felt like an achievement. That last part is probably the point. Scores were easy to compare, easy to screenshot and easy to complain about, and the complaining is what spread. Reviews at the time called it maddening and addictive in the same sentence.
Why it was removed
On 8 February 2014 Nguyen tweeted that he would take the game down in 22 hours, and on 10 February he did. He said in interviews that the game had become a problem — people were telling him they could not stop playing, and the press attention was more than he wanted. It was not a legal takedown, not a copyright claim from Nintendo and not a ban, whatever the rumours said. Anyone who already had it installed kept it; phones with Flappy Bird installed were briefly listed for absurd prices on eBay.
What came after
Within weeks the stores filled with clones — Apple and Google started rejecting apps with 'Flappy' in the name. Nguyen released Swing Copters later in 2014 and a multiplayer Flappy Birds Family for Amazon Fire TV, neither of which caught on the same way. The original has never returned to the app stores under his name.
The version on this site
flappybird.ee serves a browser remake built on the PlayCanvas engine with the original sprite sheet and sounds. It is hosted on this domain, so it does not depend on anyone else's server: the older online leaderboard the site once ran did depend on one and has been retired, so the leaderboard buttons are gone and your best score now lives in your browser. Everything else — the pipes, the medals at 10, 20, 30 and 40, the sand ground and the swoosh — is as it was.
More from the blog
- Flappy Bird Tips: How to Score 10, 20 and Beyond Without Rage-Quitting
The bird falls faster than you think and the gap is wider than it looks. Five habits that turn a score of 3 into a bronze medal.
- Games Like Flappy Bird: Six One-Button Games on This Site Worth Your Next Break
If it is the one-tap rhythm you like, these are the games on flappybird.ee built on the same idea — from a lava-cave flapper to a penguin learning to fly.
