Originally Posted by
Kotaku
"People prefer imperfect things," the creator of the incredibly popular, loved, hated and now-notorious Flappy Bird, Dong Nguyen, mused over Twitter last March, long before most anyone had ever heard of him or played his game. He was stating why he thought he'd be okay launching a video game that included some bugs. "They need something they can comment as a constructive feedback."
Nguyen has received ample feedback over the last several weeks about Flappy Bird, his maddeningly difficult game about flying a yellow bird between a series of vertical green pipes. Some of the feedback has been positive, some of it brutal, some of it from happy gamers, some from angry gamers—some of it from from gamers so infuriated by the difficult yet charming Flappy Bird that in a roundabout way they'd seemingly come to love it. Some of it's come from the press, including one regrettable piece from Kotaku. I'll get to that, but, first, more about Nguyen's journey.
For a time earlier this year, the Hanoi-based Nguyen merrily retweeted a lot of the feedback he got. He was seemingly in on his own joke that his free game was so difficult that it drove some of its players up the wall.
"Dear creator of Flappy Bird," one person Tweeted at him in late January as the game was rocketing to the top of the iTunes charts, "I hate you. Go die in a hole."
"Sorry but I won't :-)," he replied.
"I hate you and your stupid pineappleing game!" another wrote, around the same time. "I mean I hit one feather on a pipe and die! How realistic is that?!?"1
"Please don't expect realistic in games," Nguyen replied, "Beside, I think my games are not for everybody."
"As you created flappy bird," someone wrote, "can you make me win?"
"No, I cannot," he answered. "It's just a game. Take care of yourself first. I don't make game to ruin people lives."
A couple of days later, someone asked him, "How many death threats do you get a day?"
"Few hundreds," he answered.
Since late January, Nguyen has replied to dozens of gamers day after day, addressing bugs, explaining the game's medal system, seemingly laughing off the angry and/or mock-angry Tweets sent his way, seeming to take his success in good stride.
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Flappy Bird is officially no more. True to the word of the game's creator, Dong Nguyen, the app is gone from both Google Play and the iTunes App … Read…
But this weekend, as the success of Flappy Bird seemed to cast more of a pall over Nguyen, he pulled his game from the iOS and Android stores.
"I cannot take this anymore," he wrote on Twitter.
It's not clear what the "this" is. It might have simply been the high volume of attention he was getting that he seemed compelled to reply to. It might have been blowback he was getting from people who were suspicious about how Flappy Bird and other games he has made, released in May of 2013, suddenly shot up in popularity around the same time late last year. It might have been attacks on him due to the game's art style, that last category of which my own outlet regrettably contributed to with a ham-fisted article last week about Nguyen's Flappy Bird game including so-called "ripped" art from Super Mario games. It might have been any of that. It might have been none of that. (Nguyen has previously declined to do interviews and was not approached for this story.)
I can't shake the feeling that this is largely a sad story. This is a story about a developer whose game rose to prominence in the unlikeliest of ways and became improbably beloved by tons of gamers despite—or because of—its rough edges and yet appears to have become distressed by the success of his creation.
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Creator removes Flappy Bird despite making $50K/day
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