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Flappy Bird set the bar (or rather, the bars, arbitrarily placed) for simplicity in mobile gaming. Between that and the insanely high difficulty level, it created a devilish mix of game-playing compulsion that I’ve rarely seen, before or since.
When indie developer Dong Nguyen launched it in 2014, it was an almost instant hit. Everyone was desperately tapping their iPhone and iPad screens in a vain attempt to keep a tiny animated bird in the air without crashing into a series of bright green pipes. The classic side-scrolling game had almost nothing, just the flapping bird and pipes racing through it with little openings for the bird to fly through – assuming you could tap just enough to make Flappy fly, but not too high or too low.
Most people failed within the first few pipes. Experts, however, could navigate dozens. I still remember my youngest concentrating laser-like as they navigated Flappy through dozens of pipes. The highest I ever did was 13, I think.
Despite the game’s extremely high frustration quotient, people played it with the same dedication they now give to Wordle or Connections. But at least those games were solvable. Flappy Bird definitely wasn’t.
The Flappy Craze
As you may recall, the fascination with the game became a phenomenon and eventually the intense interest and relentless attention drove Nguyen into hidingHe removed the game from the App Store and has been largely unheard of since.
There have been numerous attempts to bring back Flappy Bird over the years. The app was so simple that anyone could probably code a new one, but whatever came along didn’t capture the imagination as much as the original.
Now maybe there would be a new Flappy Birdnot from Nguyen, but from a legion of fans convinced they can rebuild the old into something new and perhaps even better.
Of course, they are just as deluded as the eponymous character in the game, and the chances that Flappy Bird can fly to the same heights as, well, Flappy Bird navigating those pipes are just as high. In other words, not much.
The new Flappy Bird starts on the wrong…, er… wing by not recreating the original Flappy Bird, but adding levels, skins, and multiplayer features. In other words, they’re going to make Flappy Bird on iOS and Android an extremely traditional mobile game. It might even resemble Angry Birds, but without the cleverness or finesse.
Flappy Bird wasn’t successful because people craved something more, or perhaps visually better. They played and played because Flappy Birds triggered a monkey part of their brain that was focused on problem-solving. And Flappy Birds’ quest was a nearly unsolvable problem. Nguyen programmed it in such a way that there was no vagueness in the flight controls. Instead, it required a kind of tapping precision not seen in any game before or since.
You could argue that many hated it in a desperate attempt to beat the Flappy Bird system. Few, if any, did, and yet we played and played and often complained to Nyguyen on social media (and chased him away).
The new Flappy Bird will always be easier. People will win and compare total flight times through the maze. The skill level will be greatly reduced, but at least you will have entertaining levels.
Enough with the nostalgia
I don’t know why we have to re-watch every moment of our past and then take out the defibrillator and restart memory hearts. If we can’t resuscitate them, we play Dr. Frankenstein and rebuild them.
Like Frankenstein’s monster, these reconstructed memories bear little resemblance to the originals, but they have just enough to trigger that other monkey response: nostalgia. So we’re watching again Beetle juice after almost 35 years. Sure, that new movie might be good, but for every Beetlejuice 2there is a Land of the Lost(apologies, Will Ferrel).
The return of Flappy Birds won’t be a celebration, it will be a reminder that we can’t just leave it alone. I don’t want a new Flappy Birds, I want the original, untouched, and back on the App Store so I can fail again and again until I wish I’d never discovered it, or rediscovered it.
