What is it with near-flightless birds and successful mobile games? Angry Birds, Line Birds, Tiny Wings, Angry Birds Space, Angry Birds Rio, Angry… Well, never mind those, there’s a new example for my list called Flappy Bird and for some reason I keep reading about it on those other gaming sites people actually visit.
Sites like IGN, Kotaku, Destructoid and Polygon have been reporting on the app over the past few weeks. With this, I’ve been growing steadily more suspicious that some higher being might be fucking with my news feeds to compel me into downloading it. Hell, even real news outlets have reported on it. As a result of exposure, I succumbed against my better judgement and downloaded the game to try myself last night. I wish I hadn’t.
I’d love for this article to change tone midway. I genuinely would. It would be refreshing for me to be able to write, alongside the caustic and the bemused, that I liked the game. That I could see why it was so popular; why it has reportedly made it’s developer, Dong Nguyen (lol), thousands from downloads and ad revenue. That isn’t going to happen, however, for the simple reason that the game is terrible.
It’s simplistic, it’s boring and it doesn’t even work the way it’s supposed to. It’s like a bad port of a flash game! On my perfectly functional iPhone 4, a console which can render the wonderful looking Infinity Blade, Flappy Bird has the gall to drop frames when it does as little as load an advert. It’s a portal of infinite, sadly repetitive frustration and it’s not fun, it’s an IQ test measured by how quickly you delete it from your phone.
“An absolute dick game.” – Mathew Brewer
The question everyone seems to be asking is “Why”? Why would something so unworthy of mass attention, let alone success, be attended and successified as much as Flappy Bird is? My answer: Aliens. Be on your guard, reader, because I believe this may be the first sign of an alien invasion.
Are you one of the tasteless drones that have been slowly replacing my friends and co-workers?
The worst thing about this whole event, however, is that there is another developer in the background jumping and waving his hands; Kek Zanorg, who has indirectly questioned the originality of Flappy Bird (in fairness, Dong himself admitted to aping Mario sprite art) and directed as much attention as he can to a game he created and released in 2011 called Piou Piou.
A quick play on Piou Piou is enough to see the similarities between the two titles and as far as I can be bothered to test, Piou Piou is clearly the better game. It’s easy enough to imagine both having been created independently, they’re both very simple games with a core premise that has been played over and over since the dark ages, and Kek himself does not believe that Flappy Bird intentionally ripped him off.
Kek’s own post on Twitter, however, points out a couple of similarities that don’t feel particularly coincidental. Specifically, for me, the weird fat lips (who draws lips like that?).
https://twitter.com/kek_zanorg/status/430647482377203713
Unlike a lot of mobile games stories I find depressing, there was no evil publisher marketing this, no micro-transactions or blatant profiteering. This isn’t as spiteful a release as the latest Dungeon Keeper, but it still stings a lot. Here is a hugely successful game that is, by any standards, absolutely terrible. The designer ripped off was inspired by Mario and possibly ripped off another game which is both better and less successful. Nobody wins in this story!
Oh wait, sorry, Dong Nguyen probably wins, and soon the alien body snatchers will too. They wont get me, though!
Edit: There are no body snatching aliens. Do not panic. Everything is fine. I have not been taken over by a body snatcher. Everything is fine. Now I’m going to go play Flappy Bird again.