Flappy Bird: what was it?

In just a few weeks, mobile app Flappy Bird - simple little toy from Donga Nguyen (Dong Nguyen), a Vietnamese designer and developer in one person - it became known throughout world. It's really strange story success.

How it all began

The first hint of the appearance of this game appeared in November 2012: Nguyen posted in his Twitter a picture of the game, on which he worked:

On the left you can see the character very much looks like the main character Flappy Bird.

Six months later, in April 2013, Nguyen showed first screensaver made by him under the new iOS game with graphics in the spirit of the games on the Nintendo. According to the author, the creation of toys took only a couple of days.

He called it «Flap Flap», but here's the problem: in the App Store toy with the same name already was. Due to this fact, a new name - «Flappy Bird». Thus, May 24, 2013 she made her debut game in App Store. Nguyen shared on Twitter a direct link to the game, created for the game hashtag #flapflap and... disappeared.

Calm before the storm

From May 25 to October 31 on the game have written a total of 13 reviews. This is certainly not an indication of how many times the game has been downloaded, but it gives an idea about the level of its popularity. In September 2013, Nguyen has released the first update for the Flappy Bird, which had been fixed some bugs and added new icon for iOS 7.

The next 6 weeks game lurked in the darkness of obscurity. And then something happened, clicked. October 29, 2013 the game came in the «Family» category in the 1469 position. After a few days of her began to appear mentions on Twitter. And away we go.

Gathering momentum

As of December 3, 2013, Flappy Bird has officially hit the overall chart the App Store in the US, taking place in 1308. The «Family», she has grown to 74 positions, and the United States among the most popular games was the 395th. Popularity continued to grow. December 11 Nguyen turned up again on Twitter, responding to the user to ask about the Android-version of the application. By December 13 game broke into the Top 250 free US application, Top 80 US games and was in 14th place in the «Family». Twitter users flooded the messaging network, mostly pictures and memes, expressing their disappointment (if fit emotions in one sentence, you get "I hate this game, but I can not stay").

Here it is, success

Began in 2014 to play wonderfully: January 10, she got into the top ten of the US application, and also become eighth among the most downloaded free apps in the United States and the sixth among the most downloaded Free games.

Naturally, other game developers began to ask questions Nguyen that he is made to Flappy Bird got into Top 10, and he said that and did nothing... And on January 17 of the annex was the first among free in the US App Store. Apparently, the "apple" of users was not enough, and 22 January, Nguyen said that the Android-version appeared in Google Play.

Media has finally paid attention to the game, marveling at the level of its sudden popularity: the article about her appeared in publications such as The Huffington Post, The Telegraph and Mashable. By February 1, Flappy Bird has become a leader among the free games in the App Store in 53 countries. A February 6, Apple even post it tweet about the success of the game on its official account.

It is clear that this success has attracted a lot of attention to the person of the developer. However, Nguyen gave not so much an interview, which explained that the debit success of the game to "pure luck". Not everyone believed it. Questions began to annoy the author of the game, forcing him to ask, "leave it alone."

the price of success

Questions about water how Flappy Bird has reached such dizzying success, has become more frequent, when it became clear that Nguyen earns 50 thousand dollars a day from advertising game. The first digit of this learned The Verge, and this information is tuned part of the people against the game. At first, Nguyen as above seemed to react with humor. But it later emerged that attention Nguyen received as a result of the success of Flappy Bird, changed his life for the worse. The developer said that getting tweets, hateful, that his life was threatened.

Here and fairy tales end

February 3 Nguyen downloaded Flappy Bird update for iOS. They approved it on 8 February. Updates included a graphic change, and in general, the game has become easier. Since the update came when the game was at the peak of their popularity, many, users have reacted negatively. A few hours after the update release, Nguyen came to the sad mood on Twitter: "I think his success Flappy Bird. But she ruined my life simple. So now I hate it. " And still later, developer news stunned everyone: Flappy Bird will be deleted.

And indeed astonished users do not find it in any App Store, or on Google Play. Instead she pushed many clones, and the most ingenious people began to sell their phones with a game for big money through eBay. Nguyen was gone.

I passed about a month since then, as the Flappy Bird got into the top ten App Store. At least the game downloaded 50 million times and mention of it appeared in the 16 million tweets.

This is an excellent example of how a normal application could spread with the speed of the virus through social networks and "word of mouth". Moreover, Flappy Bird has gone right for the reason that was done not fit the mold. Anyone trying to create the next Flappy Bird, is likely to fail - this game made its way through the beautiful mix of circumstances, luck and viral. So it is quite logical that the application has gone with the same mystery, as it had appeared.