But the hardest thing of all, he says, was something else entirely. He hands me his iPhone so that I can scroll through some messages he’s saved. One is from a woman chastising him for “distracting the children of the world.” Another laments that “13 kids at my school broke their phones because of your game, and they still play it cause it’s addicting like crack.” Nguyen tells me of e-mails from workers who had lost their jobs, a mother who had stopped talking to her kids. “At first I thought they were just joking,” he says, “but I realize they really hurt themselves.” Nguyen – who says he botched tests in high school because he was playing too much Counter-Strike – genuinely took them to heart.
Fascinating interview with the Flappy Bird creator. I like this guy – he seems to have his priorities straight.
If he were really that concerned for his fellow man, he would’ve just pulled it, instead of announcing it so millions of people could download it first.
That is a fair point. But maybe he tweeted it because having decided to pull the game he thought announcing it would be the polite thing to do. In other words maybe he didn’t think through how such an action might be viewed, he just did it…
Im just saying, give the guy a break. He is just a twenty something poor kid from Vietnam. No corporate backing. No PR department. No serious ambitions at world domination. Just a guy who made a shitty little game that got inexplicably popular resulting in a flood of money and attention. He wasn’t prepared for it, never dreamed of it, and didn’t know how to handle it all.
We are all so used to corporate speak and companies gaming the media to their advantage we look for ulterior motives in everything. Maybe in this case there wasn’t one?
Maybe Im wrong – but I find it highly doubtful that this guy is as smart as you guys give him credit for.
Edited 2014-03-12 00:26 UTC
Eh, I’m not out for his head or anything
Honestly, I don’t care. Just not buying his story. I do wish he would put it back on the iOS app store though – I have and enjoy the Android version, but I hear it is harder on iOS, so I kinda feel like I’m not getting the full Flappy Bird experience 
I think you misunderstood the story. He didn’t pull the game because of his concern for his fellow man. He pulled it because of the trouble it was causing him. He empathized with the suffering it caused some people, but that was orthogonal to his decision to pull the game.
I think it was both, actually. Besides, he’s still making more than enough money on all his other games… He’s raking in millions…
Vietnamese culture exerts strong pressure on the Vietnamese, and they care about how they affect their own.
First you don’t care, and then do not buy his story as if you care.
It is as simple as:
His game got popular.
He was getting blames from those addicted to his game.
He is getting troubled by it.
Decided to pull his game out and be done with it.
Simple to believe, yet people like you make it as complicated and refuse to believe.
The sin of unbelief.
Edited 2014-03-12 08:17 UTC
There is no such sin as unbelief. Someone is either wrong or right or there is not enough information to make a decision. Belief is also not a virtue.
If he had just pulled out, there will be a lot of angry customers complaining about the game being removed without any warning tagging him an a-hole, so, i guess he had not a real “option” here…
At least he got some bucks on this announcement and people should not care.
Pulling the game does not remove it from the devices of existing customers.
I didn’t make it — since my reaction would have been a giant middle finger to the people bitching about a GAME. You don’t want your kids playing it on their phone, TAKE THE PHONE AWAY. Not like kids have a legitimate excuse to even be “cell phone zombies” in the first place.
Parenting, TRY IT! Responsible adult behavior, TRY IT!
But no, people want to blame their woes on everyone but themselves, and this namby pamby “OH what have I done” response from this guy makes me wonder just what’s in the kool-aid he’s been sipping. Someone like that would be brought to tears in just five minutes conversation here in New England the first time someone turns around and says “Hey, grow a pair!”
Sorry, had to be said. If you found that offensive, you probably needed to be offended and need a good hard look in the mirror.
Edited 2014-03-12 00:30 UTC
And how long would someone from New England last in Vietnam, I wonder?
Probably end up executed within the first 24 hours thanks to the resulting body count.
That’s a joke… If you can’t laugh at yourself…
Edited 2014-03-12 08:01 UTC
Body count from enemy fire? Or body count due to friendly fire and fragging and complete strategic fuck-up?
(I’m not Vietnamese)
You can’t just say something terrible and then postfix it with “Just joking
” to remove the stain of the statement.
Honest Communication. TRY IT! Responsible adult behavior, TRY IT!
Edited 2014-03-12 15:52 UTC
The average New Englander would probably last long, it’s not like it’s rocket science to be in another country.
Unless you have a weak stomach and freak out when people eat fried spiders.
edit: fried spiders are in Cambodia, not Vietnam. My mistake.
Edited 2014-03-13 13:22 UTC
No it isn’t. And neither is this “namby pamby” going to cry from a stern talking to by a New Englander as the previous person suggested. The Vietnamese can be quite tough even though their culture, like most East Asian cultures, are apologetic most of the time.
He was not referring to Vietnamese, he was referring to a person with a specific attitude. That’s completely different from saying all Vietnamese would not last in New England or that New Englanders wouldn’t last in Vietnam.
Yes, and he, and now you, are mistaking the guy’s “namby pamby” behaviour, which is likely a cultural thing, with something specific to him. ie, he, and now you, are making an assessment of his behaviour without understanding the mostly apologetic nature of East Asian cultures.
Oh I am SO sorry. Of course we should have generalized his behavior as a function of race and culture. We really need more of that stuff.
Here you go: “Oh man, Asians eh?”
There’s a difference between generalization and an understanding of cultural context. The one of a general apologetic attitude IS an accurate general statement about East Asian cultures. Bloody hell, even just look at the Japanese language where apologetic and overly polite phrases are part of the language structure itself. Or how about the history of Confucian culture in the region over the millennia.
But hey, never let the facts get in the way of… I don’t even know what point you’re trying to make. That being apologetic is a bad thing and a sign of weakness, regardless of whether it’s a culturally conditioned response or not? That it makes you and that other macho man feel really manly because neither of you are ever apologetic?
I’m struggling to see what else you two had to gain out of it other than feeling better about how more butch you are compared to the namby pamby half a world away. Oh you big man, you.
I tried the game and I don’t see what all the fuss is about. I played it for a couple of minutes, found it uninteresting and moved on. Why are people so obsessed about this game?
More to the point, why are parents giving their kids smart phones and letting them play games on them non-stop? How about taking the phone away or laying down the rules? How about people with jobs not play games and get to work? Stop blaming WoW or Flappy Birds for bad behaviour.
Why do you find interesting things that other people don’t?
Why do other people find the things you find interesting odd?
I don’t get it. This game existed before he was born. He makes his own version and it goes viral. Happy day for him I guess. Now he thinks this game is so evil that people shouldn’t play it? What difference does it make if they play your version or one of the other thousands?
If he is rich I can understand but going through a tough time for a year to get so much money without doing any work… Sign me up. I can recover from that.
The guy is full of shit. The game is a blatant rip-off of other games including Piou Piou and Super Mario. He most likely used bots to boost the ranking of the game. He probably withdrew the game because of Nintendo legal threats rather than for any ethical reason.
Edited 2014-03-12 10:42 UTC
You know, people think success is some kind of exact science. It is not.
There is a lot of luck involved.
You might be able to analyze why one was more successful than an other afterwards, but it is really hard to predict what will work.
It really is just the little things. Many things fail because of bad luck or just bad timing.
Bad luck could be, the first few people that tried it didn’t like it and gave it a bad review. This put people off. If others would have tried it first it would have gotten good reviews and would attract other people to try it too.
An example of timing could be ‘being ahead of your time’. It’s like a book author or painter not being successful in his lifetime, but being recognized as an important artist now. The writer Edgar Allan Poe is an example.
So Piou Piou is in French, I’m sure that didn’t help.
Piou Piou supposedly is easier to play, this is part of the reason it isn’t as addictive.
Because Flappy Bird looks so simple, people are surprised they fail early the first time they try it and think they made a silly mistake and try again and then try again and again. And that was the addictive element in this game.
I didn’t claim that he wasn’t lucky.
Putting it very bluntly the guy is a blatant cheat who directly copied major components of other games. He withdrew the game when he was caught.
He should spare us from his sanctimonious drivel about unintentionally corrupting the minds of children.
You realize that there is nearly zero real innovation in mobile gaming, right? Angry Birds is GORILLA.BAS with birds instead of bananas. Minecraft is sandboxed Doom with hand tools instead of guns. You can trace the lineage of just about every iOS or Android game back to an earlier version. I don’t see you calling out those games’ creators for being “cheats”.
I don’t know if it’s jealousy, bigotry, or some other character flaw, but you seem to hate this guy without ever meeting him. You act as if he’s personally wronged you.
Oh wait, I know! You worked your ass off to beat the game and then he deleted it. See, I can make horribly incorrect and unsubstantiated statements about someone I don’t know too!
Now, that is just not fair. GORILLA.BAS is actually fun.
The best thing about GORILLA.BAS was the ability to customize the game, as you had access to the source code. I don’t know how many kids might have gone on to be game programmers after experiencing that (it was QBasic after all), but it was definitely fun!
Increasing the explosive strength of the bananas was especially awesome!
Flappy Bird is a direct COPY of Piou Piou with very slightly altered graphics and a Super Mario based soundtrack.
I don’t like jim because he is a plagiarising arsehole who pretends to have ethical reasons.
Hardly. Some of us have got better things to do than play childish games.
Edited 2014-03-14 04:48 UTC
Games dont hurt people.
People hurt people.
He could program a “time-out” in the game so that people _have_ to top playing it for awhile. Or limit it to X amount of minutes per day. He could put in a parent mode where parents could set limits as to how much and _when_ a player gets to play the game. That would stop kids from being able to play it during school ours, until they figured out their parent’s password.
Really, non of it matters.
This is such an easy game, in other interview he said it made it in 3 days.
So it is really easy to copy the game concept.
And because it is so easy and not even new he can’t patent it either (copyright only applies if you copy existing binaries, artwork or code, not when someone re-creates it in their style).
He can do whatever he wants, it’s not a solution there are/will be alternatives.
Edited 2014-03-12 14:39 UTC
He is considering bring the game back.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/03/flappy-bird-creator-consideri…
In that case he should have replaced it with the inferior “New Flappy Bird” – then when everyone hated it, re-release the original as “Flappy Bird Classic” & make a killing.
So now when it has a higher profile and mindshare than ever before he might bring it back. Oh the coincidences…
…he retires Flappy Bird for whatever reasons and then he continues making games in the same style (the article mention 3 of them) which may become another Flappy Birds, recreating his reasons to retire them. No, I don’t buy his explanation.
…if I had a game that took me short time to make yet was making me 50k a day, I’d just “flippy bird” the people blaming me for all that.
You could just feel bad about it AFTER the income dries out.
Does removing it really stop anyone from getting their fix?
The one good thing to come from whole stupid episode? Whenever someone pulls something similar in the future, we now have the perfect terminology for it: a “Dong move.”
What’s a “Dong move,” you ask? Throwing a “I’m taking my ball and going home” hissy-fit (bonus points if it’s rationalized by pissy whining about “haters”), only to do a complete 180-resversal shortly afterward. In other words, it’s the melodramatic, passive-aggressive younger sibling of rage-quitting.