Flappy Bird: Game over

There's this new game that just came out. The graphics aren't very good. It's not very complicated. It's really, really, really difficult. And here's the thing. You and everyone you know are about to be playing it a lot. From The Verge and Vox Media, this is Version History, a show about the best and worst and strangest and most important products in tech history. I'm David Pierce, and today, the only thing we could be talking about is Flappy Bird. We'll see you next time. You're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.nl. Go to Shopify.nl. That's Shopify.nl. Power your business with the platform trusted by millions today. When the political winds change, will there be accountability for those who bent the knee for the Trump administration. If these corporations think that the Democrats, when they come back in power, are going to play by the old rules and say, oh, never mind, we'll forgive you. I think they've got another thing coming. I'm Preet Bharara. And this week, Ambassador Susan Rice joins me to discuss leadership, decision-making, and the state of the rule of law in America. The episode is out now. Search and follow Stay Tuned with Preet wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back. Let's talk Flappy Bird, the greatest game that I hope I never have to play ever again, but I'm going to probably play right now. Jake Astranakis is here. Hi, Jake. Hey, thanks for having me. Steven Tortillo from GameFile is here. Hello. Welcome, Steven. Thank you for doing this with us. So Flappy Bird, the simplest game, there's pipes, there's a bird, you tap on the screen to make it go up, you let go, it goes down, you try to go as far as you can. that's the whole thing and somehow we have an infinite amount of stuff to talk about today but the very first thing I would like to do is I just want us all to just play Flappy Bird does this sound okay? have either of you played Flappy Bird in recent history? I don't think I'm going to be very good at it sorry I already feel anxiety one can still find this game if you try but I have not played this game in let's see push in 12 years now so that's about right We're going to see how we do. Okay. All right. This is good. So let's just, we, by some miracle, we have a Nexus tablet here. And by some miracle, I mean the Verge's Andrew Marino have a tablet with Flappy Bird still on it. The real, the real thing. And we are going to play it right now. Steven, you get to go first. For people who don't remember and are just listening, this is a red bird. I'm tapping the screen, trying to get him to go through, or her through, gaps between pipes. All you do is tap. And if you so much as gray as that pipe, you're dead. Whoa. Eight. Eight. Eight is the score to beat. Jake, you want to go? Yeah. All right. Let's go. High stakes. Oh, Jesus. It is amazing how immediately stressful the game becomes. It is immediately stressful. The thing is, it feels terrible to play. It really does. And, oh, God. Eight. Eight. Okay. I felt good about it. Yeah. I have to get to eight. Otherwise, I'm the loser of the group. Nope, I got two. This game is awful and already makes me want to break this stupid device. We're going to leave this here. What a perfect mobile game, though. That was perfect. Like, you said it felt bad to play, Jake, but that's perfect. Like, play it quickly. You have the challenge, the satisfaction. I'm actually like my heart rate is like elevated now from playing for one minute so okay so the the the reason we're all here is because this game like flashed in a really big way we all covered it in certain ways we're actually like real parts of the story in certain ways that we're gonna get into some some of which are better than others but we're gonna come to all of this but let's just start the story of Flappy Bird from the very beginning which is in May of 2013, the game appears sort of more or less out of nowhere. It's created by this one guy, this Vietnamese developer named Dong Nguyen, who built the app, he said, in a few evenings after work. In his day job in Vietnam, he was programming location devices for taxis, but he really wanted to be a game developer. And so he was like working on stuff. He built a lot of like prototypes, just stuff he could do in a few hours. He really, really loved the game Angry Birds. So one fun way to think about Flappy Bird actually is if you looked at Angry Birds and said, this game is too busy, how do you take the thing that makes Angry Birds sort of fun and repeatable and strip everything else out of it? And that was kind of what he was thinking about. He wanted a game, he said, I believe it to a Rolling Stone reporter who went and found him. Which is, again, the heights to which this goes is a Rolling Stone reporter went and found him in his neighborhood in Vietnam. But anyway, he had this idea that he wanted a game that you could play in one hand while you were holding on to a train strap with your other hand. And this was like, these are the things where he's like, this is how I want to make this game work. I think it's such a charming story in that way. Like this was a man with a really clear vision of what he wanted to create in this game. And he executes it, right? It is super simple. It's really familiar in its graphics. There is one control and you can play it quickly. Yeah. He executed on that so well. Another thing that I really like that I found is he said he modeled the game on paddle ball, the game where you have the paddle and the ball on the string, and you just try to keep it up as long as you can see it. Similarly frustrating. Similarly frustrating, but it is. It's just that one. But addictive. It's a very simple mechanic over and over and over again. It seems like it should be easy, and it will drive you to absolute madness. That is the perfect description of what he has achieved, too. Totally. And this comes out at a time when mobile gaming is kind of this open-ended frontier for game development where anybody can kind of make anything and hope to succeed. But this is a time when, like these days, it's very hard to have a hit game on mobile. It's very hard to break through. And it's a time of opportunity. And the fact that the game is able to sort of get attention is interesting, but also the fact that for so long it doesn't get attention. and it's just part of this beginning wave of just so many games being released to the platform and sort of we then find out, you know, how it's going to fare. Yeah, it was, like, I don't want to say meritocracy, but it was an open field in a way that you could just put a game on the App Store and it could organically take off, which really doesn't happen anymore. Right, and the you in that sentence could be an individual developer in Vietnam just as much as it could be electronic arts. If anything, the larger companies would struggle more to find hits. And so you have a lot more solo developers and small team developers finding success on the mobile platform back then than probably you even do now. And that's an interesting moment for mobile gaming to have been in because we think of so much of what happens on iOS and Android is relatively closed, especially on Apple for a very long time. And this was a case of even within that sort of closed system, people having lanes to be creative and to hope that their stuff would sort of catch a global audience. Totally. And yeah, I think he doesn't seem to have any of those ambitions, which I think is part of what's interesting about this. So one fact about Dong Nguyen that's very important is he was kind of chronically online in a way that ends up, I think, backfiring on him fairly spectacularly. And so as a result, one of the ways I was able to sort of chart the story is was through his tweets. He was all over Twitter during this whole era. There's an article, I think, where they were like, we went through 1,000 of Dongwen's tweets to figure out what he was thinking. Yeah, and I mean, it is all kind of just right there. But he was making a bunch of other games at the time. One of the games I think that he was most excited about, seemingly much more than Flappy Bird, was this game called Shuriken Block. And let me just play a brief clip of how this game works. So you have these five characters down at the bottom. And you just try to tap the thing that's falling to kill the characters before it kills the characters. And if you don't, it lodges in their head and they die. Yeah, this looks impossible. This is the shtick of this game. These things fall very quickly and you tap it. And the sooner you tap it, the more points you get. And if you don't tap it quickly enough, they die. Pure, simple. I mean, no more macabre than like jumping on Goombas to kill them. No. No more weird than eating mushrooms to get larger and throw fireballs? Sure. And I will say, a thing I learned about Dong Wen is he was very intrigued by how characters die. One of the things that seemed like took the longest in Flappy Bird is what happens after the bird hits a pipe. Tell me, what does happen after the bird hits the pipe? It face plants. So it just sort of face plants into the ground. And he actually experimented. The dopey kind of. Right. He experimented with a bunch of more gruesome ways for it to die. and like playing around and eventually decided that face play was the most delightful thing he like wanted this game to be funny and also like complicated and fun to play and all this stuff but like making it silly was important in the way that like embedding something into this guy's head is less funny so anyway so this game launches May of 2013 gets no press none of us I don't think really noticed it it was not really like a thing by the end of that year it was number 80 in the free games section of the iOS app store. Just to give you a sense. So like people are playing it, but it's not like a phenomenon in any sort of meaningful way, right? But what starts to happen, especially towards the end of 2013 and at the beginning of 2014, is the people who play the game almost universally have the same reaction, which is just sheer unbridled rage at how hard and how punishing this game is. And so, like, do you guys remember when Wordle came out and the, like, sharing mechanic of Wordle was that you could post your Wordle scores with those sort of icons? Little squares, yeah. Yeah, and so that became a way that people were discovering Wordle. This happened with Flappy Bird, but it was literally just people tweeting, like, I fucking hate this game. This is a nightmare. Why do I keep playing? And this is, like, this becomes the churn that starts to get people to play Flappy Bird. Let me just play you. This came a little later, but this is a YouTube video that somebody made about Flappy Bird. And just starts pummeling his phone with a hammer. It took nine hits to destroy the phone. Phones are good. What are you going to do? Impressive. So this is, I would say, a roughly normal reaction most people had to playing Flappy Bird. And this turns out to be a super compelling way for people to play video games. I do think it's really unique that like I with a lot of things that, you know, blow up on the app store. It feels like somebody discovers it. Right. There's an article. There's an influencer. There's like one single point where it blows up. And I don't think there was that for Flappy Bird. Right. It was really this organic thing. It was a very sort of slowly and then all at once. Yes. That. Yeah. I looked and looked and looked to see, like, who was the person who, like, wrote the story or made the video or whatever that put it on the map? and there just isn't one as far as I can tell. No, I mean, it does track with when gifting happens around devices. And so this is like a Christmas into New Year's thing. And so it could have been that people were getting their new iPhones, they were setting them up, and then so much of mobile game discovery has always been about what's in the rankings already. And then, okay, that's a popular game. I'll try that as well. It was a free game. So there's the ability for a game to blow up that way once it reaches a certain height. But obviously for most of 2013, it's not even on anybody's radar. But it is the nexus of so many things that are perpetually intriguing to people about video games. Games have been difficult from the beginning. In fact, games notoriously took the quarters away from you and asked for more when you were playing in the arcades. And developers made them tougher. And there is just something. I don't know if it's like a specific mechanic or a specific kind of person or a specific. But there is a thing people gravitate to about something that is deliberately, impossibly, unnecessarily hard. To get abstract about it for a bit, to me, it's that games represent a possible better model for how life and the world could work. In that when we work hard at our job, do we automatically get a raise? No. If we're going to the gym and we're lifting weights, do we always get stronger? Well, hopefully, but then we reach a certain age where maybe that's not happening. Video games present the promise that if I do this thing, the number will go up. If I put effort in, I will see a statistic that shows me that that time I put in is worth it. And I think that's the appeal of any super difficult game is that it's going to play by a certain kind of rules that is not going to cheat you. And you will feel, you will see, you can measure some level of achievement. Of course, when the game is that hard, the success feels that much more elusive. And this is one of the things I think is so interesting is there's absolutely no evidence to suggest that Dong Wynn was like carefully thinking about how to make his game difficult so you would keep playing it more. Like there's no... If anything, it's the opposite. Right. I don't think he was doing engagement metrics. I don't think he was like using focus groups to get it. But he found by accident this like exact right balance of I hate this and I cannot stop playing it. And so and this is when it really starts to take off. So again, at the end of the year, it's number 80 in the free apps on iOS. By January 17th, it's number one in the App Store. Like it slowly and then all at once. And the game just absolutely took off. and I went through a bunch of the reviews from the time and overwhelmingly the vibe is I hate this game and I cannot stop playing it. Like this is everybody's experience. It's like get this away from me but never take it away from me. And then January 22nd, so five days after, it's like a huge explosion on the App Store. It launches for Android and then immediately jumps to the top of those lists too. This is like, it's the biggest app in the world for a period of time. And it was so popular that his other games, like the ones we just saw, also start to jump into the top 10 of app stores. So Dong Nguyen, this one guy in Vietnam, is now one of the world's biggest app and game developers out of nowhere. It's really hard to convey, like looking back, just how big and like culturally relevant this game was. Yes. Do you remember when you became aware? You were running Kotaku at the time, so you're like paying more attention to the gaming world than most. Do you remember when Flappy Bird kind of hit your radar? I don't, I don't. Now, you know, I was running Kotaku, one of the bigger gaming sites at the time, and most of what we covered were console games and PC games to an extent. And when we would cover mobile games, it would be a challenge to get people interested in them. So I think for us as well, as best I can recall, it was so unusual that we could even dare to think that we can write about this mobile game. People will, A, know it, and they'll care about it. So how we heard about it, when we heard about it, hard to say. But like everybody else, once we knew it, we understood it. And then you could write about it and people reacted. Oh, did they ever. So, okay. So the app hits the top of the app store January 17th and stays there. Like just the momentum is out of control. And then the more popular the game got, I would say there started to be like a vibe shift around it. So Dong Win starts getting death threats. He starts getting racist comments, like really truly horrible stuff from people who feel like they're being personally victimized by this game. And again, like I think it especially started to transition for people who were playing the game a lot. And this is a thing he said both during and after all of this. It's like this is not a game you're supposed to play for hours at a time. It is like he designed it as a game to play while you're holding a train strap, not sitting on your couch for six straight hours. And so having just played it for two minutes, I can imagine what it would feel like after six hours of this punishing constant failure. And it would be upsetting. And people started to experience this. And it just starts to get really ugly for him online. He's posting through it. He's begging people to basically be nicer to him and each other, to play the game a little less. Everything was going to be fine. He had said he was working on a Windows Phone version of the game simultaneously. but that keeps getting delayed because he's dealing with all of this other stuff like you get the sense that the success of this game really sort of spun back into his personal life in a way that became pretty quickly a huge problem um and this is one of the massive downsides of being an independent developer and a solo developer is there's no buffer for that right there's no publisher level and that that's going to insulate him from any of the negative feedback right he he had said at one point he didn't want to get a PR person because he wanted to stay connected to people. He didn't want to feel like a corporate guy. But he also became this huge celebrity in Vietnam. And so it was like there were paparazzi following him around. He became a massive celebrity in really wild ways. And then comes the part where The Verge plays a really interesting role in this story. On February 5th of 2014, so again we're like two and change weeks into this app being the biggest thing in the world. We published a story, Ellis Hamburger on our team did an interview with Dong Nguyen. He didn do a lot of interviews but he did one with us And wrote kind of offhandedly in the story that it was making a day in ad revenue in the games And Stephen, is it fair to say that like the internet kind of collectively lost its mind about this fact? Yes. You don't usually know what developers make from games. You hear a number like that and there are people impressed. There's people jealous. there's people who already have emotional feelings about the game and that complicates it i guess yeah well okay and now this is where kotaku figures back into this story you don't say because uh i mean you i'm sure you were there you were running the place you didn't write the first story about the flappy bird revenue fiasco uh but do you do you remember sort of the reaction to that as you were as you guys were thinking like okay this is the biggest game in the world we know how much money it's making uh dongwin also said in this interview the game had been downloaded 50 million times so it's like the the the size of this thing is no longer in question or in doubt uh and and then i don't remember any any major discussions about like how are we covering flappy bird i mean we were pretty a pretty freewheeling news organization and and opinion writing a bunch uh and so i think it was people had ideas about stuff they wanted to write about flappy bird and one of them made it onto the page. Yeah. So, well, so basically what happened, I would say is, uh, is Kotaku ends up publishing a piece and the original headline is Flappy Bird is making $50,000 a day off ripped art. Yeah. Um, and the, and, and the, the story is essentially, it looks like he just yanked some art straight out of Mario and put it into his game. Right. Here's the green pipes from Mario. here's the green pipes from Flappy Bird and so the writer is kind of like look at this he just copied some art ripped some art is the verb used and he's making all this money from it and this story blows up like blows up right it's very negative and critical and we had and I think there were people who agreed with it and there are people who felt like it was way over the line yeah I've seen both of those and I think one of the fascinating things is like just going to Reddit and like pasting the link you see all sides there are people who are like yes this this asshole developer how can he be doing this and it is i think there's something changed when it became clear that he was making a lot of money and it was also very clear that he was uncomfortable with how much money he was making right but there was there there was this thing that changed we're like okay not this is now not just like a free silly game that i could be mad at this is a free silly game that is a huge business and i now have a different relationship with the person who made it right and so there were a ton of people who saw this article and we're like, this validates everything I hate about this game. This person's a monster. I'm going to go attack them personally on Twitter. Well, we didn't say he was a monster. No, no, Kotaku didn't say that. And I think the range of reactions, both positive and negative, weren't all to the extremes, right? As I was saying before, gaming, the experience of gaming is, you know, the experience of playing a difficult game is also one of that kind of reckoning with the difficulty or what it is the developer is doing that seems to explain the difficulty. And so throughout decades of playing video games, when you play a really difficult game, I think sometimes in the back of your mind you wonder, has it been made this difficult purely for the art of the level of challenge that I'm experiencing? Or is there a financial incentive by the developers? And so perhaps in some people's recollection, and I don't remember what my own feeling was about it at the time, nor do I know exactly what our writer was sort of thinking through on that. But I think for some people, maybe seeing that monetary figure, knowing it came from advertising, knowing the advertising appeared and reappeared the longer you played, some people may have felt, oh, he must have made this game so difficult in order to force the game to run longer, display more ads, make him more money. And so they may have felt manipulated at the time. And I think you can make a clearer case that that is the dynamic that's operative in certain other older games. But what we know about the biography of Don Wynn is that it doesn't actually seem like that was his agenda. There's no evidence of that in a thousand tweets that he sent. And I also want to say the Mario thing is real, right? Like this looks like Mario. It was clearly inspired by Mario. It has a bunch of Mario or Mario-esque assets. Is that malicious? Is it trying to replace Mario in some way? I don't think even remotely. But is he intentionally, you know, creating this as an homage to those old games? absolutely is is is that factor making this more comforting to people and making it a more appealing game absolutely is that a reason you should hate him i don't think so but there is something there that it tapped into where if you're looking for an excuse does this look like mario does this look like it's trying to ape old nintendo games a little bit right because it is well the the problem that because i eventually write something on kotaku about this the problem that i had with the flappy bird fiasco yes which was not only about our article but then we we revised the headline to say flabby birds make fifty thousand dollars off of mario like art right and that's the change and for me the the verb ripped conveyed a theft you know an act of you know sort of you know unscrupulous behavior by the developer which actually takes on new relevance now because so much of the question around game development like this week last week this month is about the role of generative ai and how art actually makes it into video games and what is authentic what is created by the developer and what is stolen from somebody else and so this is in a way like a proto version of some of the debates we see now about games and other creative works in terms of how do we feel if we're playing something we enjoy or we're seeing something that we think is beautiful but we have either a suspicion or even a confirmation that it is being built upon digital assets that have been cloned or carried over. And so the initial tenor of the piece is one that's much more closer to the idea of, did he just copy the Mario sprite, the Mario pipe sprite? And if that were the case, and if that were proven, let's take that sort of worst case scenario. If he had just remixed Mario elements, does that actually take away the fact that the game is compelling and feels bespoke of compared to what Nintendo has made. I would argue that, and I talk about this in the follow-up piece that I write, that the combination of elements that results in a game is as important as the ingredients themselves. And that you can't just take a set of assets and immediately have a brilliant game. There's something that I think we were all talking about, about the perfect tuning of difficulty and yet it's not so punishing that you don't want to, you know, that you want to put it down. So, okay, so I think this is a good moment to take a break, brush up on our Flappy Bird skills, and then the story takes a big turn here real quick. We'll be right back. All right, we're back. So all of this is happening, and then we come to 2.02 Eastern time on February 8th, 2014, and Dong Win tweets, I am sorry, Flappy Bird users, 22 hours from now, I will take Flappy Bird down. I cannot take this anymore. That's it. That's the tweet by which he announces that the most popular app in the world will soon be gone in 22 hours. I mean, it's obviously like a giant outpouring of response. A lot of people were sad. A lot of people thought it was a conspiracy theory that he was trying to juice downloads, that he wasn't actually gonna pull the game, but it was basically threatening. Yeah, that it was a stunt to get more, downloads. And then he followed up a little bit later saying, his tweet said, it's not anything related to legal issues. I just cannot keep it anymore. And then again, right after that, he said, I also don't sell Flappy Bird. Please don't ask. This is how the game dies all at once. Right. He's, you know, there's all this negativity around the game all of a sudden, like we were talking about, right? There's the thing that, you know, our coverage was touching on. And this is before, you know, we talked about how Kotaku published a few pieces. This is before I've kind of come back and said, hey, maybe we went too far. I think it was ripped art. So there's this negativity around the idea of like, wait a minute, did this game have some sort of questionable origin? And then there's all the stuff that he's tweeting about, about people not being able to like get out of bed because they're playing Flappy Bird so much or whatever it is. So there's just all this negativity that's clearly weighing on him. And yet it's super unusual because people are used to at that point games persisting and continuing to exist. And the only reason they go away is because the technology becomes obsolete and it's now running on a console that nobody can operate anymore. But the idea of somebody even being able to pull their game from existence. Games are – a greater percentage of games were physical at the time. So, you know, you would have had the disks of games. The idea that you can kind of revoke access to a game or make that game inert so that inevitably when your phone's operating system is going to update, the game is no longer going to work. I think introduces a new idea that people hadn't really thought about or experienced with games before, which is their potential impermanence. And the fact that something that maybe people didn't buy with money, but had invested time into, suddenly would be gone. Super unusual. And I think, you know, freaked a lot of people out. Yeah. And I really think the overwhelming response was to be like, well, this can't possibly be true in some way or another. And in fact, it did get downloaded another 10 million times in the next 22 hours. This becomes a huge thing. Right. So 10 million more people go and download the game. But then, as promised, 22 hours later, February 9th, the game disappears, just goes off the App Store and it's just gone. And for all intents and purposes at this moment, Dong Wynn also kind of disappears. Like he makes abundantly clear that he this is not about the game. This is not about the money. This is not like it seems like he personally just couldn't do it anymore. Well, and the other part of this is the economic stakes, right? He's throwing away a million dollars in a month, right? $18 million a year, as Kotaku pointed out at one point in his story. But he just gives all of that up because he's fed up with the response to this game. Yeah. Because it is not adhering to what he wanted people to experience. And the other thing that he's really talking about at this time is, you know, you look at his game design. This is a game that's meant to be played for instance, right? Just a brief moment throughout your day. And people are becoming obsessed with it. They're telling him that they can't stop playing. They're spending hours a day, that they're not doing their homework, and instead they're playing this game. He doesn't like this. He had been like pleading with people on Twitter, like take breaks. Don't just play this game all the time. And I think there's something remarkable about this, that he looked at that and went, this isn't what I wanted from this. If you can't be responsible with it, you can't have it. Right. And takes it away. And there are game developers to this day across various games who have these mixed feelings about how their games are played. There was recently interviews with Kenny Sun, the developer of Ball Pit, which is a really fun kind of breakout style game. But it has this progression element because your ball is bouncing against enemies who you're defeating. You become more powerful. You can build up this whole town. And it's a very fun game. and it's one that's hard to stop playing. And he was talking recently about how, oh, I'm happy that people are playing the game, but people are talking about playing it and not being able to stop, and I feel uneasy about that. And this is a different dynamic that you're going to have if you're the creator of a video game that really hooks people than you are if you're a creator of just about any other art form where there's more of a sense of, oh, people are going to finish this thing and put it down. But if you're making a game, there is the potential that people won't stop. And while there seems to be many obvious upsides to that, like Dong Wen's story is the story of the downside. Well, and the upside, right? Like it does, it very much cuts both ways. And I think if you, from a more sort of ruthless money optimizing developer, it might have gone really differently. But it really does seem like this was just not what he wanted out of this. And eventually it was just like all of this money is not worth what it is costing me personally. Right. It's the money. It's right. And it's the fact that he's the main character. Yeah. To the extent that you can be a main character of the app store, right? Because we know about people being the main character of social media. But he is people's focal point for their leisure time, which has become their frustration time. And then he is the person they're all talking about or to. They're ascribing motivations to him. That's a hard – I imagine if you're him, you're trying to figure out how do I have this stop? What do you do to stop it? I mean he could have also just made the game super easy. would have been another way to make a stop. Or like just to say it, like just get off Twitter, dude. Like it wouldn't have solved all of the problem, but it would have solved a bunch of the problem. Well, technically speaking, I don't know if it was Twitter or emails or what it was that was necessarily happening. And I also don't know the dynamic of being in Vietnam and the extent to which are people reacting to him because he's from Vietnam and is there elements of xenophobia to that is the time difference. You know, he's awake and I don't know what his sleep and wake schedule is at the time, but he's potentially somebody who may not be in real time experiencing the reactions of people in the West who are playing the people globally who are playing the game. But this is a global story as well and we don't actually know the extent to which where he's based and where the players are based kind of how that's intersecting with each other. Right. And I think he continues to get lots of questions even after shutting down the game and I think that was a big part of the reason and he just sort of decided to just disappear. Like one big running theory around the internet that we haven't really talked about is there were a lot of people out there who thought that the only way he could have possibly been as successful is he must have been using bots to game the App Store, including people who like really ran this to ground. And if you sort of squint at it, there's some evidence that makes it look a little suspicious that the game hit the way that it did. But it also, nothing else about the game story of suggest that that is a thing that this person would have done. He also responded at one point on Twitter. What he said is, it doesn't matter. Don't you think if I did fake it, should Apple let it live for months? Which is a very funny way of responding to that. And then, yeah, and then the questions about whether the art is original, whether the idea is original, like all of this just sort of keeps following him. And you can tell very quickly he just bails. He's just like, the only thing I can do is just get out of here. So the app leaves the App Store and is replaced with just unbelievable speed by Flappy Bird clones. Like, just millions of them. I will give either of you $50. $50. You can name one of, there were, I believe, five in a row that were immediately at the top of the App Store and they were all Flappy Bird clones. Can you name any of them? Flying Bird. You are alarmingly close. Flying Bird. That's good. There was Iron Pants, which sure. There was Fly Birdie. There was Splashy Fish. There was Flying Tongue. There was Flappy Wings. There was Jumpy Jack and Tiny Flying Drizzy. And if you remember that one, that was Flappy Bird, but it was Drake. Yeah. And if you were to say, David, why? I would not have a good answer for you. Did you see that at one point the Washington Post made a Flappy Bird clone? Did they really? Not only did they make a Flappy Bird clone, but it was to promote their 2016 election coverage, and you played as the flying head of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. Okay, that's very good. It was not good. It was DC-themed instead of the pipe. It was the Washington Monument. It was not good. Wow. That's perfect. I have no notes on that. But so this all happens, I mean, and for weeks, it's just Flappy Bird clones at the top of the App Store. And then this game, Smash Hit. I don't know if you guys remember this game. Super fun game. It's not a clone of Flappy Bird, but it rules for exactly the same reason. It's another one of the sort of like how far can you go kinds of games. That goes number one. And then essentially after that, the craze is over. Normal things go back to the top of the app store and the world kind of resets. Throughout all of this, Apple and Google are trying hard to stop apps with Flappy in the title from being allowed. A fun fact at the beginning is this game wasn't originally called Flappy Bird. It was called Flap Flap. But when he put it on the App Store, he got in trouble because there was another app on the App Store called Flap Flap. So he changes it to Flappy Bird. And then all of these other companies try to come in and basically do Flappy Bird and they cannot. But none of the clones hit the same way. None of them replaced the thing. And ultimately, like immediately, Flappy Bird is still so beloved and so missed and so powerful that you could sell a phone that had Flappy Bird on it still for like thousands of dollars on eBay. This just market suddenly appeared for Flappy Bird. And Steven, my question to you is why this game seems like the easiest game to clone ever. And if you're Dong Wynn, it's not like he's going to sue the people cloning the game that he just took down. Why didn't any of these hit the same way, do you think? If you've ever played Super Mario Brothers and you've pressed the jump button or you've run and then you've played another side scrolling game and you've pressed the jump button and you've run, you very quickly understand why Mario Brothers is the one that became popular. popular. There are elements to timing and physics in game design that to the naked eye, you might be like, oh, that's just another game of a bird going through spaces through pipes or whatever the Washington Monument perhaps. But in fact, the tiniest difference in the momentum of the ascent or the speed with which the bird falls or the forgiveness in the width of the pipes and getting it through, all of that factors in to something that's hard to articulate in words, but that you understand with your fingers when you're playing it. And I don know that the people who were trying the clones were necessarily walking away from them thinking this did not have the same responsiveness or physics design as that game I loved. But they probably at least understood or felt that the game just didn't feel as good. Maybe tipped just that much more towards annoying and frustrating without being compelling to return to. Or maybe it was just that easy enough, that success that people thought they wanted turned out to not actually be the experience they were craving. Right. Yeah, if you get 150 in a Flappy Bird clone, it's suddenly not Flappy Bird anymore. Right. I'm also sure there's a big viral element to this too, right? Part of the appeal of Flappy Bird is we were all playing this at the same time. We were all losing at the same time and feeling frustrated at the same time. And I think if you show somebody, oh, look how frustrated I am at this not Flappy Bird. It's like, well, we're all playing different not Flappy Bird. It's not the same experience. I'm playing tiny flying drizzy. Yeah, yeah. Nobody wants to know about my Quirtle scores, which I'm obsessed with them because it's four world rules at once. Quirtle's sick. But, you know. Have you ever played Octurl? That's a whole. Oh, man. Octurl's. I can't wait. You're not ready for Octurl. Oh, man. You're not. Nobody's ready for Octurl. But Steven, I think, I like the way you put that. And one of the things I've been trying to do in prepping for this episode has been to try to put Flappy Bird into, like, a lineage of games. And this is a thing lots of people have tried to do, which I think is really fun and interesting. And there are two games before Flappy Bird that have come up a lot that I just want to talk very briefly about. The first is a game called Quest for Tires. Do either of you know anything about this game? Never heard of this in my life. It's a very old game. It's going to be very clear why you have not heard of this game. But this is, when people talk about like, okay, what is the very first thing that ever sort of seemed like Flappy Bird? This is a game that comes up a lot. And it is just a little man riding around. He's on what looks like an old stone wheel and you ride on it and you just have to jump over stuff. And there are different kinds of obstacles and it is just a question of how far you can go. That's it. That's the whole mechanic of the game. So Quest for Tires is from 1983. It was on like the Commodore 64. This was... So the idea for this kind of game it's called an endless runner. This is like the genre of game. Quest for Tires was way before anybody had called anything an endless runner. Then there's this game called Cannibalt, which comes out around just before Flappy Bird, but in like a similar kind of era. And this is what Cannibalt looks like. It's a, you're a handsome dude running on top of buildings. I played hours of Cannibalt. So this, Cannibalt is the game, this game is so fun. And it is like, it's beautiful and it's stylish. And you just tap to make them jump. Otherwise the running is happening. They run on their own. You just have to make them jump. Across the rooftops. And this is, this is what many people considered to be the first endless runner game. And then, of course, this becomes, I would say, if you were to pick the sort of core mobile gaming mechanic, I think you could make a case that it's the endless runner. This is how we get Temple Run, which obviously becomes humongous. This is how we, the Flappy Bird is nothing if not an endless runner. This thing becomes sort of core to mobile games. Right. When Nintendo brings Super Mario to mobile, they make Mario an endless runner. Right. Yeah, exactly. And so that is, I think, like Flappy Bird very much fits into that lineage, but does also have, there's just something about it that is unique, right? And anybody can make an endless runner. Anybody can do more complicated things. Subway surfers eventually becomes a huge thing. It's like the brain rot thing on TikTok everywhere now. but yeah I think even if nobody has ever been able to like perfectly quantify it there seems to have just been something about Flappy Bird that was different and I've enjoyed it ever since too because it's also I don't know if you guys have noticed this but it's like a coding challenge people give a lot where it's like it's such an easy game to make that it's like anytime any AI system comes out that'll let you code or anytime you're like wanting to learn a new coding language or anything one of the easy tasks everybody gets in everything is build Flappy Bird and what they actually mean is you can build a thing with pipes and a bird that moves from left to right but i think the thing that we all discovered is that that's not what makes flappy bird flappy bird and that maybe in fact we've never discovered exactly what made flappy bird flappy bird um so okay so at this point the game is over it's gone and i think for really years nobody ever really thought about it there's still a million flappy bird clones the endless runner thing continues. The Guardian at one point put out a story with 95 Flappy Bird inspired iOS games which came out in a span of 24 hours. Just to give you a sense of how intense this thing was. Well, the Amazon Fire game is out in 2014, isn't it? Yes. And you can still that's the only version of Flappy Bird that still exists, which is deeply bizarre. But that's the thing apart that gets forgotten about the story is that people remember the game going away. The game kind of shows up from Dong Nguyen pretty quickly just on another platform. And a platform that it seems has the potential to insulate him from the negativity that he was experiencing, right? And it's a family-oriented multiplayer game. So it's an opportunity maybe for the story to, in short order, become more positive for him. But I don't really remember that game generating much buzz. It sort of comes out mid-2014 and it's just kind of not a thing. It's just not the thing. Yeah, and he had said in that Rolling Stones story, he had said he was thinking about bringing the game back and he was going to make sure that there was a warning in the game telling people to take breaks. And then, yeah, then Flappy Bird's family comes out. And then in August of that year, Dong Wen releases a new game called Swing Copters, which he had designed to be completely different. And he tweeted when it came out, which is kind of a heartbreaking tweet. He tweeted that it's a game which I believe people will feel happy to play, hopefully. Like, devastating. But anyway, let me just, here's what Swing Copters looks like. Just real quick. Instantly dying. Like, it's... That is a Dong Win game. It's, instead of going left to right, you're going up as fast as you can, and there's, like, hammers swinging, and you're a little helicopter trying to go up. This one looks like Doodle Jump. Do you guys remember Doodle Jump? Sure. Very similar game. and this I don't completely understand how this is designed to make you happier than playing Flappy Bird but what is true is that it didn't take off like the the phenomenon was just sort of over and for a long time that's just kind of where we left the story until 2024 when kind of out of nowhere at least to my eyes it starts to appear that Flappy Bird is coming back. And we, I don't know what your reaction was, Stephen, but we at The Verge were immediately deeply skeptical that this was actually Flappy Bird coming back and then started trying to run down, what is this thing? Where did this game come from? Is this, is Dongwin just putting it back? Are we doing this again? What is happening? How did this happen? And then it appears the story is very weird. and Stephen you covered this I would say as better than anybody else that I've read because what it turns out is there is like a kind of a decade long fight underneath this game comeback Right and that Dong Nguyen had not quite fully walked away from Flappy Bird the way it appeared publicly or at least that people affiliated with him hadn't so yeah when same experience that you just described when the press release came out August September of 2024 that it's coming back that was from the Flappy Bird Foundation. Okay, well, who are they? Why are they not just saying they're Dong Wen? Like, what could this possibly be? And I started digging into it. I was long gone from Kotaku at the time and had my own newsletter, Gamefile, and so kind of juggling that with other things. And I'm thinking, there's got to be something I can find about this. And I started just digging through public records to try to figure out the trademark, who owns this thing. By the time I publish, the Flappy Bird Foundation has begun to really feel the heat. There's a tweet that goes viral where somebody figures out that there's a trademark. I think it's that the trademark had been abandoned for Flappy Bird. And so surely this can't be Dong Wynn. And what I figured out was that if you go all the way back to 2014, everybody was trying to trademark Flappy Bird in February of 2014, including Dong Wynn, who had at least three different trademarks that were filed. And those trademark efforts actually come to a head very close to when he pulls the game. It's February 9th or so, right as he's pulling the game, where he's put in another trademark application. And it seems like he's going to be able to secure this. It's hard to tell in retrospect if the trademarks he was pursuing right up until that moment of pulling the game were being pursued because he had long-term plans for Flappy Bird. We do know that the Amazon version of the game was still set to come out in the summer, and he would want to have rights to Flappy Bird over that. Or if perhaps he was trying to secure these trademarks as part of an effort to stop the clones from happening. If he could at least lay a legitimate claim to Flappy Bird, maybe that stops other people from trying to recreate this thing that maybe even he's fearing could replicate the negativity and the impact on people's lives that he seemed to be worried that his creation had wrought. We don't know because all I could find was the history of the filings. There is another group called Mobile Media Partners, and they're one of the people also trying to trademark Flappy Bird at the time. and he Dong Nguyen puts out that tweet saying in 22 hours I'm pulling the game that sets up the game to be deleted at noon the following day by 1pm Mobile Media Partners has gotten iOS to authorize them to list a game called Flappy Bird and then in their trademark application that they sent to the USPTO they're saying look here we are the only app that is allowed to be called Flappy Bird. We have some mocked up screenshots. It looks like Flappy Bird, but the bird has a green army helmet on. Otherwise, it looks like the same thing. We get back to how Flappy Bird is kind of this touchstone for creativity and iteration and what actually is sort of fair game and what isn't. And they lay this claim to it. So mobile media partners, in theory, is going to get the ball rolling with putting out a Flappy Bird game. This isn't stopping all the other clones from happening. But Apple's policy, to the point of the name thing, Apple wasn't like running a trademark policy, but its thing was only one app can have a name in the app store. That was the entire- And it's these people who have it. Right. I don't think the game comes out if I'm remembering the chronology correctly. But there's a trademark fight because the trademark office says, wait a minute, there's other people, including this guy, Dong Nguyen, who also have trademark claims to this. And this leads to a multi-year sort of competing set of filings where the USPTO is deferring to Dong Nguyen and his trademarks. But they're saying, you've got to prove that you're actually going to use this. Or you have to present to us a legitimate explanation for why you're not using it yet, but why you should still have the trademark. So while in the public eye, he's gone from Flappy Bird, aside from this Amazon game, up through at least 2017, he or people representing him are filing extensions saying, give us more time to say that we're going to use it. And so when I was reporting that in 2024, I was fascinated with this idea that maybe he was doing all this to stop the clones from happening, to stop anybody else from trying to replicate or successfully replicating this Flappy Bird phenomenon that for him had become so negative. But he eventually stops trying to renew these trademarks. He abandons that or his lawyers abandoned that. And at that point, the clock starts running on when other people, including mobile media partners, potentially can make a claim. They're the ones who are next in line to do it. They're told by the USPTO years later, okay, it's going to go to you. They then have a window of time where they have to prove that they're actually going to release something. And their window of time to show that they're going to do something with it expires in September of 2024. They're the ones who sell the rights to the people who've become the Flappy Bird Foundation who announced the launch of their crypto-enabled Flappy Bird for September of 2024. Let me just play you the trailer for that game, Flappy Bird. It's just Flappy Bird again, but it's Flappy Bird with new levels. New worlds. Oh, look at that. An overworld map. Was that a person playing on the toilet? I think it probably was. People getting unreasonably high scores, I would say. 16. It is so, I don't know, kind of infuriating. this is the complete opposite of what dong wants for this game correct right they have turned it into by all by all accounts or you know a very reasonable game there are some levels there are some skins on it it's nothing crazy the game is basically what you would do or what chat gpt would tell you to do yes if you were making a better flappy bird totally yeah and so the the this all this all kind of comes to a new head when dong tweets he says no i have no related with their game. I did not sell anything. I also don't support crypto, which is a very funny burn on this whole project. There is one other piece of this that we should talk about before we finish the story, which is a game called Pew Pew vs. Cactus, which I had never once in my whole life heard of before it became embroiled in this whole thing. Is this a game you were aware of? Was this a popular game in any way? I'd heard about it in relation to Flappy Bird, and it complicates the narrative only to an extent, which is that This is a game that came out, I think, in 2009. Just for whatever that's worth. And it gets mentioned a little bit when Flappy Bird was first blowing up in 2014. But it is much more overtly mentioned by the Crypto Flappy Bird Foundation folks in 2024. Because sensitive to the fact that they're going to be accused of taking this game from Dong Wen and bringing it back against his wishes. They say, oh, by the way, guess who we have involved. Because they are. Right. They say, guess who we have involved. We have somebody named Keck. And who is Keck? Keck is the developer of Pupu versus Cactus. And if you look at this game, it has strong visual resemblances, or more accurately, Flabby Bird has more strong visual resemblances to Pupu versus Cactus. And so while there had been discussion, as we talked about, about whether Mario was an influence, there were always kind of these unanswered questions of this. And if you go back and you look at some of what Dong Wen has said, this is my own art. What he's saying can be as relevant to talking about the Mario accusations and claims as it can be about P.O.P.O. versus Cactus. But it's very clear what the crypto people were thinking because in their statement, they talk about having Keck involved. They provide a handy hyperlink for people who want to know more about this. And they don't link to like a video just of P.O.P.O. versus Cactus. They link to an article which is like 20 games that became popular when they actually just ripped off other people's games. And I think the idea they were trying to inject into the discourse was, hey, we actually have the real creator of the real thing involved. And all this other stuff wasn't even the legit thing. We're not lifting Flappy Bird because Flappy Bird lifted Pew Pew versus Cactus. Okay, real quick, before we get off the subject, Jake, you've never seen this game before, right? No. So you have perfectly fresh eyes. Let me just play you this clip of Pew Pew versus Cactus. And you can tell me how much you think this looks like Flappy Bird. We have a little yellow bird. This is Flappy Bird. Oh. It's a yellow bird flying with a desert in the background. I would point out that bird just hit a damn cactus and is still alive. Hit it again. Still alive. That's three. This bird is hitting a lot of cactus. I've never played it, and I don't know if you're supposed to die and fail when you hit a cactus versus it just slows you down. Otherwise, what are we even doing? Because you're being measured in distance. Oh, I see. So how would you fail? So in a certain sense, utterly entirely different game, right? But also we're looking at a bird flying between green things that are sticking up and sticking down. Maybe two people have the same idea. It's extremely similar. But it's also fascinating because this game clearly does not have the key mechanics that made Flappy Bird pop off, right? No, it doesn't. I'm already bored by this game. This is an endless runner that never ends. It's a literally endless runner. He just kept hitting into the obstacles and kept going, right? Who cares? Yeah. All right. We need to take one more break, and then we're going to come back, and we're going to do the version history questions, and we're going to see if this thing makes the Hall of Fame. I kind of hope it does. Justice for Dong Wynn. We'll be right back. All right. We're back. It's time for the eight version history questions, and then it's time to go play an awful lot of Flappy Bird. If you want to buy this from us on eBay, you can, but it's going to be very expensive. All right. We have eight questions, the same eight questions for every product. Question number one, where does Flappy Bird fit on the time matrix? The time matrix maps right idea, wrong idea, right time, wrong time. Every product fits into only one of these four quadrants, and we have to decide. I don't think we're going to even argue about this one. Okay. Hit me. I think this is unimpeachably right idea, right time. Right? It exploded. People loved it. It worked. It ruined its creator's life. What more could you want? But if we want this, if we're saying Flappy Bird as a phenomenon, if he had released this game two years later, would it have hit the same way? No. Two years earlier, it would have hit the same way. The install base was smaller. Is the idea right? Clearly it was. It exploded. I don't think there's any argument for it being anything other than right and right. Steven, any thoughts? I just, well, the timing is an interesting question because for whom is it the right time? For people who played it like it was discoverable and more people got to play this game and enjoy this game or experience the emotional arc of this game than possibly they would if it was released before or since But for the creator to the extent that it made him miserable was it the right time? Or would it have been better for him if it had come out at a time when nobody noticed it? But the other wrinkle on that is that it did come out when nobody noticed it. Right. Flappy Bird in May of 2013 is a game that is both beautiful, it's beautiful it's brilliant and it also is not wrecking this man's life you get the distinct sense that number 80 in the free games section of iOS would have been where Dong Wen would have happily lived for the rest of his career yeah so I don't know so I don't know if there's another time that might have been better optimized for the creator's happiness and given that this is something that we're talking about that has so directly tied to an individual being the creator I feel like we have to potentially at least consider it's the wrong time for him yeah i mean i think if if the goal is how big can the game possibly be the i think the only argument would have been to maybe ship it like a little bit earlier when there was less competition in the app store but also like what he won the app store so that's not really and if he ships it a few years later i think the the like expectation of games on mobile has shifted so much that maybe it just leaves this entirely behind, right? Like I think the fact that this kind of very simple endless runner thing had a shelf life is telling, right? If you want people to know the name Flappy Bird, I think there is no other time he can launch this. I tend to agree with that. Number two, was Flappy Bird peak anything? I think peak endless runner, yes. Like you could maybe make a case for Temple Run, but like nobody loved Temple Run the way they love Flappy Bird. Right, and some of the surfers I think wound up being bigger. Yeah. In terms of, well, you said nobody loved Temple Run. Nobody hated Temple Run as much. Well, sure. Those two things are very close to each other, right? Yeah, peak that, yeah. This is also like kind of right around peak Twitter for good and bad. This is like, there are very few like stories that fully encapsulate the entirety of Twitter that do it better than the Flappy Bird story. Yeah, it's peak me having to update a headline. That's for sure. Peak, not quite peak Steven Chaos, but close to it. No, no, Gamergate was still down. That came a few months later, yeah. Jake, do you have anything? I mean, it was peak Flappy Bird. It sure was. That's for certain. And that's one that actually, like, if we're going to say, you know, thing was peak thing, I usually get annoyed by that. But in this case, there were so many other. There is one and only one Flappy Bird. And it was a blip and it was he ended it on his own terms. He did. So I don't know. This is sort of a tricky one. I think Flappy Bird's explosion points to the peak ishness of a bunch of things. Right. The opportunity for small indie mobile games in the app store, absolutely, right? That sort of viral discovery on Twitter, maybe. I don't know if it's necessarily Flappy Bird that causes the peak of any of those things or that is the peak, but it's definitely playing into, I think, the frothing environment on both of those. I also want to suggest one, which is this is, for better or worse, peak people understanding or even thinking about the humanity of the people who create video games. Video game developers are harassed all the time to this day for what they make for the smallest of things that might upset the most angry and awful fans online. and game developers are very often just treated as if they were corporations, if they were solos, as if they're not people, as if they're not artists, if they're not people with feelings and emotions. They are expected to be available and respond to any complaint about a game at any given moment on Twitter. They are subjected to a great amount of abuse from people who complain about this perceived or real politics of their games, who don't like the designs, who don't like the change of the game. And it's rough being a game developer and people often don't treat game developers like they're real people and have any sort of deference to someone's humanity. In this moment of this viral game and this unusual decision to pull the game, the people I think were forced to reckon with the fact that it's a human being that created a video game and process their feelings about how what we think about what we play relates to and impacts the person who made what we play. And it actually would be great if this wasn't the peak moment and if people were as cognizant of the humanity of game developers since then. But I would say this is the moment where that really became the most acute. Yeah, I agree. And I think people were sending those tweets to a person, not to like an EA support account. You know what I mean? And it's like people at the very end, I think only finally understood who was on the other side of this thing in a new way. Question number three. If you could time travel back knowing everything you know now and take this thing over yourself, could you make it even more successful? And in this case, what I want to do is I'm sending you back to 2013 and I'm making you Dong Wynn's conciliary. You're there. Okay. Making the game along with Dong Wynn. Yeah. I would advise him. And you're not allowed to say don't take the game off the app store. Yeah. I think this is very simple. I think you say, Dong, I'm going to publish this game into the App Store. Now I'm going to need you to go to a monastery. I'm going to need you to stay there. For eight years. Yes. And chill this all deal with the trademark. Don't worry about it. It's going to be chill. I'm just going to quietly change your Twitter password while you're asleep. I think that is the only way this goes better for him. Well, but if you take him at his word, part of what upset him was how people were using it. Right. And I think that, well, yes, not having his contact info probably would have helped. I think that for the goal that he was seeking, maybe you do need to add in some sort of termination point for your daily play. The things that were really annoying about so many Facebook games and kind of free-to-play games, which is that you could only play so many times and then you had to wait. Maybe to achieve what he wanted, you would have had to include something like that. Although once people found they couldn't keep trying, maybe they wouldn't have been as engaged. But I think maybe he would have been OK with that. Yeah, I mean, and I think you're right. Well, and the problem with all of the ones that are that shut you off for, you know, unnecessary amount of time is that they'll let you pay to skip it. Right. And that's just a dynamic that everyone immediately understands is kind of gross. Yeah. Yeah. But in that case, yeah, it would have been a fascinating thing if he had just been like, you've played 10 times in a row. Like, that's it. See in 60 minutes. just that alone might have changed people's relationship with this game alright question number four will the youth ever make it cool again is Flappy Bird and I guess the version of this question is like are the young people going to rediscover Flappy Bird and make even this past version of it a thing again are the prices for Flappy Bird phones on eBay going to spike again because the kids want to tote around a device that lets them play Flappy Bird. Would it work? You have kids who like to play games, right? Would they be as into Flappy Bird as people were 11 years ago? I don't think so. I think arguably the coolest thing that happened with Flappy Bird is that he took it away. Like that's the most punk rock thing that he did, right? So if you're like, what would be the perfect homage to that? What would be the way of doing Flappy Bird again? It would be an entirely different game blowing up. And the developer saying, I'm taking that away. and then kind of wreaking havoc in the process. So I don't know if that's the kids doing it, but to me that would be the greatest tribute of kind of the Flappy Bird spirit. I like that. Jake, any thoughts? Are the youth going to bring it back? Well, they literally can't. You can't get this thing. But I do think there's another question of would this game have had longevity, right? Is this Tetris? I don't know that it is, right? But Flappy Bird is as much about the game itself as it is about that viral moment. And I don't know that you could ever replicate that. It's not only a fun question to wonder what if it had not gone away, but what if it had taken six more months to go away? Like, I think a useful thing to remember is that the Flappy Bird phenomenon was like five weeks. Like, it was not long enough for even the most overplayed people to get truly tired of this game. And you wonder if it had lasted six more months, would the people who were super into it have started to churn out? Because the thing about Tetris is there's infinite strategy to Tetris. And there are lots of different ways you can play it. And there are lots of different ways you can think about it. And every game is slightly different. This doesn't strike me as a game that would have had infinite staying power, even if it had stuck around. Tetris is such an interesting comparison, though, because it has thrived amid iteration. tetris as an idea is one that other people's versions of tetris not always great but sometimes have been great true in flappy bird we still are back to this thing where it's like there's only one version of flappy bird that really seems to be phenomenal maybe i'm overestimating the extent to which people are unimpressed with the versions that kids you know can play at a at a chuck e cheese or something like that but i do think that there's a the reason that those clones on the app store and there's always there's still clones of the game out there is that there is something about this that made it so much harder to replicate and it does i think it puts it in a different category than tetris where there's something about the idea of tetris that you can then apply differently with different music different aesthetics and maybe even different speeds of the blocks falling down plus all the myriad ways you can play it that open it up to a lot of different you know sort of player experiences and this goes back to being something where it's It just seems like there's only one very fragile, delicate way to set it up. It doesn't teeter one way or the other. They got it just right. Yeah. Even Dong Wynn was like, I did something here that I don't understand, and I'm not going to mess with it. And everybody who ever tried never figured it out either. All right, question number five. What feature of this should every current version have? And Stephen, this one's mostly for you. I'm curious, like, is there something we could lift out of Flappy Bird and drop into, like, mobile games circa 2025 that would be powerful? The thing that I think, it's not a version of Flappy Bird, but I think that the quality that is the most powerful about Flappy Bird that would be great to see other game developers figure out how to capture is that ability for it to be that universal talking point, that thing that everybody experiences at once. The closest we have to that maybe is when Fortnite does a scheduled event and everybody sees the concert that happens on Saturday afternoon at the same time and they can talk about it. Flappy Bird, probably more by accident than by design, was able to create a shared moment in video games that everybody could collectively experience at once and relate to. And that's something that I really cherish about that game. You see it happen only a few other times. Pokemon Go and people kind of had a sort of shared universal experience with that. I would challenge developers, publishers, whatever. How can you engineer a game that can create a moment that people can experience kind of in unison in that way? And then what does that do to how people feel about the game, how people talk about the game? It's a harder thing to achieve for sure, but that's where I would push people. I like that. Yeah, I was going to say the thing where the game immediately explains itself the first time you play it is so rare and so hard to do, but so valuable. And it's one of the things that makes that happen. Anything for you? What would you? This might be a little punishingly difficult. I mean, this is very hypothetical, but I think the thing that is most beautiful about Flappy Bird and this story is Dong's, I think, clearness of vision. He had an idea, and he didn't want to deviate from it. so much so that rather than change it, rather than milk it for cash, he was like, nope, peacing out. That's it, right? I'm done. And that's kind of an extreme, but it is one of those things where I think in every single app or game or system or whatever that we use these days, it always feels inevitable that as soon as it explodes within a matter of days or weeks, they're going to be trying to make money off you. They're going to be trying to keep you there for longer and longer. They're going to stuff it full of a bunch of stuff you don't want. Flappy Bird never changed. Never changed and he refused to change it. And you know, it's he really like let the game die on that hill. And like, man do I respect that. Yeah. An argument for not inshittifying your creations. Finished products, man. More power to them. Alright. Three questions left, these are the Virgin History Hall of Fame criteria. For a product to get into the Virgin History Hall of Fame, it has to pass all three of these tests. Test number one, did this product do something truly new? That's a hard one. I think it's a no. I think it fails on this one. And I think what's fun is I think it might pass the next two, but I think this one... Like Cannibalt, just tapping and jumping. It's not a clone of Cannibalt, but like short session, easy to control, one-handed game, like all of those. Even Dong Wynn had done it before. Yeah. It's a perfect encapsulation of all the ideas it's exploring. Yeah. But. Well, that gets to criteria number two. Was it either remarkably good or remarkably bad? And I think Flappy Bird is perfect because it is so very much both. It really is. Yeah. It is remarkably good and horrible, cruel, terrible, all at the same time. But that's good too. I mean, fair. It is bad in a good way. Yeah, it's remarkably good. If it fails at anything, it fails at what he hoped, which is that it would be a short session game. And it fails at that and it fails at sort of waving its player off. It's not sufficiently discouraging. Right, losing is not losing in Flappy Bird in a way. But no, it definitely achieved. Yeah, and I think that one is so borne out by the number of times we've seen others try to do the same thing and just fail. Nothing has even come close. It's always born out by playing it. Yeah. Like, it's one thing to just focus on numbers and all that. Just touch the game if you have access to it. And it's just like... It does feel different. It really does. I've played a lot of games since, but picking this up is like, you immediately feel it as Flappy Bird. It's really interesting. All right. Hall of Fame question number three. Did it have a lasting impact? This is an interesting one, Flappy Bird. What do you guys think? I mean, I would say no. Flappy Bird did not influence an explosive new genre. It didn't influence a bunch of people to pull their games when they got too addictive. It lived, it exploded, and then it was over. Stephen, any disagreement? No. I mean, it has impact in that people remember it, that people have tried to replicate its success. But you don't look back in the gaming world or even in the mobile gaming world. There's not like a world pre-Flappy Bird and a world post-Flappy Bird. like did it did it sort of change the nature of mobile gaming in any way no i think when people think about to the extent that it's part of a design tradition it's part of the design tradition of incredibly brutal games and you have to look at something more like demon souls for having a legacy in terms of the difficulty of that game and then the way that the that game handles difficulty influencing subsequent games and i just don't see that here so i would say like an impact on our memories and on our kind of emotional sort of on our feelings about about this whole saga right yeah we think about it as a human drama as much as we think of it as a product that came and went but not an impact in terms of meaningfully changing or influencing future games and technology i think yeah directly that's fair it's had a real impact on my self-confidence during this episode but otherwise i think that's right well and you got this earlier steven but But I actually think the bigger thing for me, the lasting thing, is not the game. It is his decision to remove it. And that is so striking. And I cannot think of anything else that has replicated that kind of, I don't know, decisive moral clarity and sort of chaotic decision in the tech world since then. And it's sort of a legendary decision. You can't replicate it. and we don't need Flappy Bird to come back, right? Flappy Bird is not what lasts. It's that he pulled Flappy Bird and that's why we're still talking about it. Which was truly like one of the more punk rock things ever and no one has done it. It would be like Mark Zuckerberg just shutting down Instagram because he's like, everybody's using Instagram too much. I don't like it. I'm going to close it. Ball or move, not going to happen. All right, that's it for the show. Thank you both for doing this. This has been tremendous fun. As always, if you want to support everything that we're doing here and make sure we get to keep making more of this and buying weird things on eBay. Please subscribe to The Verge. You can subscribe on YouTube. You can subscribe on theverge.com and get all of our podcasts ad-free, which is super cool. Lots more version history to come. We'll see you next time. Version history is part of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Zayner Adams, Victoria Barrios, River Branson, Eric Gomez, Owen Grove, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, Andrew Marino, and Alex Parkin. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. Studio support from Matthew Heffron, and our theme music is composed by Brandon McFarland. Be sure to follow the Version History podcast feed to get all of our new episodes as soon as they arrive, and to support everything that we do, and get access to all of our podcasts ad-free, including this one. Make sure you subscribe to The Verge. Thank you.