Flappy Bird is a simple mobile game created in 2013 by Dong Nguyen, a Vietnamese game developer who worked under his company, Gears. The game is a side-scroller where the player controls a bird named Faby, trying to fly through green pipe columns without touching them. The player’s score increases with each pipe they pass. Nguyen made the game in a few days, using a bird character from a game he had planned to create in 2012 but never finished.

The game was released in May 2013 and became very popular in early 2014, becoming a sleeper hit. Some critics said the game was too hard and claimed it copied ideas from other games, but others said it was fun and addictive. By January 2014, Flappy Bird was the most downloaded free game on the App Store for iOS devices. At that time, its creator said the game earned $50,000 each day from ads and sales.

Flappy Bird was taken off the App Store and Google Play on February 10, 2014. Nguyen said he felt guilty because he believed the game was too addictive and caused people to play it too much. After the game was removed, people who had downloaded it before sold their phones online for high prices. Copies of Flappy Bird became popular on app stores, and Apple and Google later removed similar games.

In August 2014, a new version of Flappy Bird called Flappy Birds Family was released only for Amazon Fire TV. A company named Bay Tek Games also made a licensed version of the game for arcade machines.

Gameplay

Flappy Bird is an arcade-style game where the player controls a bird named Faby. The bird moves continuously to the right, and the player must guide it through pairs of pipes with gaps of the same size placed at random heights. Faby falls automatically and only rises when the player touches the touchscreen. Each time Faby successfully passes through a pair of pipes, the player earns one point. If Faby hits a pipe or the ground, the game ends. After the game ends, the player receives a bronze medal for scoring 10 or more points, a silver medal for 20 or more points, a gold medal for 30 or more points, and a platinum medal for 40 or more points.

Development

Dong Nguyen grew up in Vạn Phúc, a village near Hanoi. He first learned about video games by playing Super Mario Bros. as a child and started writing his own games at age 16. At 19, while studying programming at a local university, he earned an internship at Punch Entertainment, one of the few video game companies in Vietnam. While using an iPhone, he noticed that popular games like Angry Birds were too complicated and wanted to create a simpler game for people who are always moving.

Flappy Bird was created and developed in two to three days. The game was originally named "Flap Flap." The bird character, Faby, was first designed in 2012 for a game that was later canceled. The gameplay was inspired by bouncing a ping pong ball against a paddle for as long as possible. At first, the game was much easier than the final version, but Nguyen found it boring and made it more challenging. He described the idea of offering a free download with ads inside the game as "very common in the Japanese market."

Nguyen believes that modern Western games are too complicated. His company, .Gears, says its games are "heavily influenced by retro pixelated games from their golden age. Everything is pure, extremely hard, and incredibly fun to play."

Release

Flappy Bird was first released on May 24, 2013, and supported the iPhone 5. The game was later updated for iOS 7 in September 2013. At first, the game was not very popular, but it gained many players after being reviewed by the Swedish YouTuber PewDiePie. In January 2014, Flappy Bird became the top free app in the US and Chinese app stores. It also became the top free app in the UK App Store, where it was called "the new Angry Birds." By the end of January 2014, it was the most downloaded app on the App Store. The Android version of Flappy Bird was released on Google Play on January 30, 2014. In early 2014, the game’s creator, Nguyen, told The Verge that the game earned about $50,000 daily from in-game advertising.

On February 8, 2014, Nguyen announced on Twitter that he would remove Flappy Bird from Apple’s App Store and Google Play. He wrote, "I am sorry Flappy Bird users, 22 hours from now, I will take Flappy Bird down. I cannot take this anymore." He said the removal had "nothing to do with legal issues." The game was removed exactly on time, disappointing many fans.

Tuoi Tre News, the English-language version of the Vietnamese newspaper Tuổi Trẻ, reported that a local technology expert suggested Flappy Bird’s removal might have been due to a legal challenge from Nintendo over similarities to Mario games. Nintendo denied this claim in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. Vietnamese lawyers also denied that Nguyen removed the game because of laws related to internet use in Vietnam.

After the removal, some merchants on eBay listed phones with Flappy Bird pre-installed for prices as high as $1,499 or more. Some listings received bids over $90,000, but eBay removed them for violating a rule requiring smartphones to be restored to factory settings before being sold.

In an interview with Forbes, Nguyen said the game’s addictive nature led to its cancellation. He explained, "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." He said the guilt he felt over the game affected his sleep, and he felt relieved after removing it.

In a March 2014 interview with Rolling Stone, Nguyen said he might re-release Flappy Bird if it included a warning to "Take a break." On March 19, he announced via Twitter that the game would be re-released on app stores, but not soon. In May 2014, Nguyen told CNBC’s Kelly Evans that the game would return in August with multiplayer features and be "less addictive."

As promised, a revised version of Flappy Bird, called Flappy Birds Family, was released in August 2014 exclusively on the Amazon Appstore for Amazon Fire TV. This version included new obstacles and a multiplayer option not in the original game.

On January 12, 2024, the trademark for Flappy Bird was terminated and given to Gametech Holdings after Nguyen failed to reclaim it. Gametech announced an unofficial reboot of the game on September 12, 2024, more than ten years after its removal. The game, named "The Flappy Bird Foundation," was released at the end of October 2024, with a mobile version released in 2025. Nguyen stated he had no connection to this game and did not sell any rights to it.

Reception

Flappy Bird received "some positive and some negative reviews" from critics, with a Metacritic score of 52 out of 100, based on seven reviews. The Huffington Post criticized the game, calling it "very frustrating and hard to play" with "poor graphics and unsmooth movement." IGN gave the game a score of 5.4 out of 10, saying it was "easy to become addicted to but not very deep." While IGN said the game was not skillful to play, it noted that the gameplay could be "a fun distraction for players who enjoy quick, simple challenges." Many users found the game very hard, with one user saying it took him 30 minutes to score five points. The game’s creator said it was slightly easier to play on Android devices than on iOS.

When asked by Chocolate Lab Apps, a website for app developers, the game’s creator, Nguyen, said he did not use any special methods to promote Flappy Bird. He said the game’s sudden popularity in early 2014 might have been due to "luck." However, an online marketer named Carter Thomas believed Nguyen might have used computer programs called bots to help the game become popular. When asked about this by The Daily Telegraph, Nguyen said he respected others’ opinions and did not want to discuss the matter, adding, "I’d like to make my games in peace." When Newsweek asked about the claims, Nguyen wrote, "If I did fake it, should Apple let it live for months?"

Kotaku, a gaming website, criticized Flappy Bird for using graphics similar to those in the Mario games, calling it "stolen art." Later, Kotaku corrected itself, saying the game’s green pipe was "a new but not very creative drawing." Some Vietnamese newspapers, including Thanh Niên and BBC Vietnamese, reported that Flappy Bird is very similar to a game called Piou Piou vs. Cactus, which was released in 2011. These similarities include the way players tap the screen to move, the bird’s design, and the obstacles like green cacti and pipes. French newspapers, including 20 minutes and Metronews, also reported that Flappy Bird might be a copy of another game. Thanh Niên said the similarities between Piou Piou vs. Cactus and Flappy Bird were very noticeable.

The French developer of Piou Piou vs. Cactus, known as Kek, told Pocket Gamer that he noticed Flappy Bird looked "very similar" to his game. Kek tried to contact Nguyen, who said he did not know about Kek’s game when he created Flappy Bird. A technology editor named Patrick O'Rourke from Canada.com claimed Flappy Bird was "almost a complete copy" of Piou Piou vs. Cactus and also borrowed the main gameplay idea from a game called Helicopter Game. He also said Flappy Bird used sound effects from the Super Mario Bros. games.

Legacy

After Flappy Bird was removed, many similar games and humorous versions were created, such as Flappy Bert from Sesame Street and Fall Out Bird by Fall Out Boy. Flappy Bird became one of the most copied games on Apple's App Store. At its peak, more than 60 similar games were added daily to the App Store, leading Google and Apple to stop approving games with the word "Flappy" in their names. CNET tested seven "Flappy copycats" for iOS two days after Flappy Bird was removed, calling the choices "not very good," but noting that the underwater game Splashy Fish was the closest to Flappy Bird.

Soon after Flappy Bird was removed, security experts warned that some versions of Flappy Bird and its copies on other Android app stores contained harmful software that could cause unauthorized charges on users' phone bills. The number-matching game Threes was compared to Flappy Bird because of how people react to them and because both are part of groups of similar games.

In February 2014, Code.org, a nonprofit organization that teaches computer science, introduced lessons that let students create their own copy of Flappy Bird.

Nguyen, the creator of Flappy Bird, had other games, Super Ball Juggling and Shuriken Block, which reached 6th and 18th places on the App Store in early February 2014 due to Flappy Bird's popularity. In March 2014, he shared that he was working on three new games with similar styles. One of these, Swing Copters, was released in 2014 and had gameplay similar to Flappy Bird.

An Easter egg in Android Lollipop (version 5.0/5.1) allowed users to play a version of Flappy Bird called "L Land," which replaced the pipes with flying Androids and Lollipops. This feature was updated in Android Marshmallow (version 6.0) to "Marshmallow Lad," adding support for up to six players.

On New Year's Eve in 2014, Google created an animated Google Doodle that included Flappy Bird as one of the year's most searched topics, along with the World Cup, the Ice Bucket Challenge, and the Philae spacecraft. A similar game called Flappy Tom was added as a mini-game to My Talking Tom and also appeared in Talking Tom and Friends.

In 2016, a gamer named SethBling recreated Flappy Bird in Super Mario World using special coding techniques.

In June 2023, the game Deep Rock Galactic added a parody of Flappy Bird called "Jetty Boot" to an in-game arcade cabinet as a training tool for obtaining Jet Boots used in the game's missions.