"Flappy Bird was almost preposterously simple. If you ever played the game, even once, you surely remember how it worked, but here's a summary just in case. You were a bird. Your job was to fly, left to right, for as long as possible without crashing into the green Mario-ish pipes coming from both the top and bottom of the screen. Tap the screen to go up, stop tapping to go down. That's it. That's the game."
"Almost as soon as it took off, though, players began to rebel, annoyed at both the punishing difficulty of the game and the sudden riches it was bringing its developer. Things got so bad, so quickly, that at the peak of its popularity Nguyen did the unthinkable: he simply removed the game from stores. For this episode of Version History, we dust off our tapping fingers and dig into the story of Flappy Bird."
Flappy Bird was a minimal tap-to-fly mobile game where players navigated a bird through gaps in green pipes by tapping to rise and releasing to fall. The game's punishing difficulty and retro visuals contrasted with its absurdly simple controls. In early 2014 the game surged to the top of app stores worldwide and became a cultural phenomenon, generating intense player backlash over difficulty and controversy about the developer's sudden earnings. Clones proliferated across stores, spreading the game's mechanics. At peak popularity the creator removed the original from app stores, and versions or similarly named games remain available in some places.
Read at The Verge
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]