I managed to download it. Played it for five minutes. Said something a lot like “fuck this… life’s way too short.”
The complete lack of things like sound and music control, the extremely crude level of control and the details you mention indicate to me this is a fluke… a first-time developer’s late-beta experiment that managed to catch the wave. I’d suspect the developer is simply embarrassed at having such a crude app get massive attention.
Look for it from Roxio, all polished up. Which won’t necessarily be an improvement: life’s still too short.
I doubt that. Unless of course, he’s kicking himself for not charging $.99 for it.
I think the appeal is its simplicity.
No music, no settings no way to change it. It is what it is. The only thing you can do is mute the game. You can’t even change the orientation of how the game is presented on the screen.
Yes, you can hack it, but there’s no point in that. It is just a mindless game you can play without having to learn anything except how the bird reacts to a screen tap. I love the fact that there aren’t even any directions to it. Just a word (tap) and a finger icon. Thst’s it. Have at it.
I just got 32 and earned a gold medal. Woo hoo.
I guess the only thing left to do is try to increase my high score. But there isn’t anything special waiting for someone good at the game. No second level, no faster or slower speeds… It just goes on and on, so if you get a feel for it, you will do better the more you play it.
I think it is genius. You really would be hard-pressed to come up with a simpler, easier game to learn which still provides a challenge to make people still hit the play button after that stupid bird dies.
It’s old school. It’s clean. It doesn’t lock up and die. It takes up very little space on your device. Not a bad effort for a simple game.
The game doesn’t have any glitches as far as I can see. So I doubt he was being hammered for bug fixes.
He was not charging anything for the game, but there is advertisements on the game itself, so I wonder who is getting that revenue. I would assume he is, but maybe someone else can confirm.
I wonder if the rumors anout the game being artificially propped up have some merit to them? I honestly don’t see why the guy would do it. It sat around for quite a while until it hit a critical mass, where people were writing stories about it, rating it, and giving it all kinds of attention. But I think it was just one of those things that hit at the right place at the right time. There could be a number of games just as simple and easy in concept as flappy bird that just haven’t been discovered yet by the app. customers.
This is an interesting stoey. I hope someday the teuth comes out as to why je pulled the plug.
And just FTR, he didn’t have to pull it, correct? He could have posted something like “game will no longer be maintained and updated. Download at your own discretion.” There doesn’t seem to be much risk associated with it, as far as i can tell.
It’s a fun little game. I’ve had it since 2-6, right after reading this thread and the linked article. I played it for an houror so on and off the first day. About half that the next 2 days. And that’s it. It’s a nice diversion, but i am not hooked on it. I can’t imagine anyone getting hooked, but i guess people get hooked to all sorts of things.
I saw the article about the guy pulling it and thought the same thing about his reasons that have been discussed. I haven’t really played it much since that first day either. It was just to encounter a game that was so simple. Now I’ve downloaded Badlands and am failing miserably at it. But it’s pretty!
What kinds of ads do you see on the game when you play?
I get 2 main ads:
The 19 must own stocks of 2014
And
Are you comfortable in your retirement income?
Now, i don’t know how the ads are targeted, but I wouldn’t think a kid wouls see the same ads as what I see. However, I wonder what kinds of information this app has to my personal data?
I was thinking thst when i set up my appid, I think one of the things apple asks for is my age (or birthday, I can’t remember). Apnyway, is Apple giving my age info to the ad company, or does a developer have access to that info? I am curious either way. I can’t believe there is a variable out there that developers have access to that tells them a user’s age, but maybe there is. And if not, then apple is giving this info out and/or helping to oush the ads to my ipad. So if that kid was getting $50k a day from ad revenue, what is apple seeing?
And since this kid worked three whole days to make this program, I can see why he’d shit things doen. $50k a day is just not enough cash for the effort he put into it. :dubious:
I’m now imagining that Stink Fish Pot stayed up so late playing this game, that his eye-hand coordination is shot from sleep deprivation, thus explaining all the typoes.
I AM tired, but I cannot blame the game for my sleep depravation.
And my bad spelling is due to my wonderful ipad, with the worst auto-correct program i have ever seen on any product anywhere.
I have given up. I just hope people will either figure out what I mean, or realize that what i say is mostly drivel anyway and not worth getting into a twist over.
As to ths story, I honestly think this is one of the strangest things i’ve heard in a while. I read the linked article, and most of the comments, and the whole thing sounds crazy.
Personally, I think the people that are attacking this guy Dong for his program because he seemed to become rich over a weekend project. People are claiming he stole the green pipes from Nintendo, as well as the sound effects and the bird.
Reallly? Even if he did, how hard would it be for him to tweek the bird bitmap, turn the pipes into telephone poles, trees or whatever, and change the color of the bird?
As long as he wasn’t being sued by anyone who mattered, what difference does anything like that make?
I think most of the holier than though people supposedly calling this guy out for theft are just jealous that THEY didn’t come up with a game sensation. No way would anyone who saw this think it would turn into a game for the masses but it did, apparently making Dong rich. Good for him.
If he doesn’t want it, can i have it? :-). I’ll take all the abuse anyone can dish out. I don’t have a twitter account, and will not get one. I’ll take the money and buy some nice, heavy earplugs and watch the money roll in.
There’s simplicity, and there’s crudity. FB has zero refinement - it’s the sort of thing anyone with app programming skills could throw it together in an hour. A two-class exercise late in an app-writing seminar. I can take the basic simplicity and subtlety of the game, but things like the lack of a sound control indicate to me it was “compile it… first screen comes up… ship it.”
And, I’m not sure what the point is. I love those games that say to me, fuck, those were such simple and easy ideas…why didn’t I think of it? Look at that one jumping iPhone game from a few years ago… Doodle Jump. That’s like something a smart kid can whip up in a 48-hour app contest, no? Who cares how simple or crude it is. Is it addictive? I played it for the first this past Sunday. I could totally understand the appeal and addictiveness of it, although I will not download it myself.
I don’t understand why you turn your nose up at something that appears “crude” to you. When an idea is simple, it is usually very good, if the implimentation of that idea is solid.
Look at eBay. The basic ebay code was put together over a long weekend, snd he had the site up within a month of first conceiving of it. I wish I did that.
This flappy birds is ingenius because it appeals to both adults and kids, and each can get addicted to it. Both of my nephews were at my home this weekend, (10 and 6) and both of them had the game on their devices. Imagine my glee of having the highest score of all of us,meven though I had only played it a few hours total (and probably not even that much).
It resets quickly. It kills quickly. You can get into a rhythm and learn to get the hang of it. A 6 year old can play it. There are no directions, and if ypundon’t care how the rest of the world is doing, you don’t even need to be signed into anything. (This is how I have it set up).
I played it twice to ight, and my second game tied my high score of 34. So, i turned it off and figured that was as good as i’d get tonight.
This is also a game parents can play with their kids. I can’t play any of the new games. I grew up in the world of Galaga and Asteroids. In other words, the graphics sucked. But I loved them. This game reminds me of the crude nature of those games.
And it always makes me smile when someone says the reason they don’t like it is beapcause it isn’t polished and looks like a 12 year old did it over the weekend. Seriously, if that’s your gripe, it sounds more like jealousy than anything. Maybe you should come up with something as simple as this without copying it, you can have the full weekend.
Go!
Oh yeah. One more thing. I realize i got it at the end of its life, but there are no bugs, it has never locked up on me, and The only option seems to be that I can play it with the sound up or on mute, whihc is a feature of my ipad, not of the design of the game, in other words, what’s not to like? It’s mindless fun, however it also offers a real challenge. People can keep playing it after they kill the bird because a new bird and a new game are ready within seconds of the first game dying and resetting.
I think it is a hit hecause of it’s clean, simplistic design. I only wish I had thought of it.
So now eBay has a bunch of auctions for devices installed with the game.
Which sound stupid enough for iOS devices but I’d think it would be fairly trivial to sideload the app onto an Android device. I’m not condoning it (although it WAS a free app anyway) but that has to beat paying $250 for a outdated Galaxy S with Flappy Bird installed.
Copter was pretty popular in like 2003, and it’s basically the same game. Pretty much all early flash games should be turned into mobile games, huh? $50k a day blows my mind.
it is as simple as you want it to be while packing tons of stuff to keep you tapping and moving forwards. would be interesting to hear what people who enjoyed Flappy Bird feel about a proper mobile game from 2011.
You can have simple and extremely well-executed. I’m a fan of “simple” myself.
Flappy Birds was closer to hack than app. Crude graphics, crude control, crude UI, crude game cycle. I can’t meaningfully substitute “simple” for any of those.
I’m curious… Why are you so negative about flappy birds? It’s just a game. And a simple one at that. Not crude… Simple.
You calling it a crude hack doesn’t make it so. If you think it is so easy to create, why not make a hack of your own, and post it. I’m sure we’d all love to see what you could come up with.
Crude vs. Simple? Come on… Even if it IS a crude hack, why do you care? Why does anyone care? And yet you do.
I don’t understand the hate for this game. Don’t like it? Don’t play it. If it reminds you of Mario, well, maybe you played too much Mario in your day. Hate the way the bird looks? Hate the way it falls? Or do you hate the fact that you can’t get very far in the game and you are annoyed that something so simple has beaten you?
I’ve read comments on-line about how people hate this app and have called this guy a thief. And for what? Using green pipes that apparently look like pipes in a nintendo game. Some guy went so far as to compare each thing in this game with whatever it was supposed to be a copy of, and proved they weren’t copies. Pixel by pixel. Who has the time to even give a shit?
As far as I know, no one sued him over the game, no one that counted accused him of copying and/or stealing. So the hate is just that. Hate…
It seems a lot of people are jealous that some guy came up with a stupid game that took off and has made a lot of money from it.
Good for him. I wish I would have thought of the damn thing.
For me, I have played it enough to get my score in the teens almost regularly, and my high score is 35. That’s not great, but it is good enough for me, i play it for about 10 minutes a day, and my best run is usually my first or second. Since I’ve figured out the drop rate and now can almost always tap it correctly to get the bird from one pipe to the next, I’ve become bored with the game. I mean, how long can you sit there moving the bird?