The equal parts passionate and reluctant app developer boasting the wherewithal to turn the concept of a flapping bird into untold wealth, Dong Nguyen, literally emerged from hiding in Hanoi last month to speak with Rolling Stone journalist David Kushner about his heady rise to fame and misfortune on the back of the aerially-challenged fish bird, ‘Flappy Bird’.
In the resulting profile, which deals at length with Nguyen’s notorious app, his nascent years as a games programmer, the rise of ‘Flappy Bird’ and the ensuing backlash that resulted in its being famously pulled from the App Store, Kushner also reveals that Nguyen, 28, is “still turning down offers to purchase the game… [refusing] to compromise his independence” and that ‘Flappy Bird’ may one day be exhumed for your avid, inexplicable consumption. Writes Kushner,
“‘I’m considering it,’ Nguyen says. He’s not working on a new version, but if he ever releases one it will come with a ‘warning,’ he says: ‘Please take a break.’”
‘The Flight of The Birdman’ also reveals that at its peak ‘Flappy Bird’ had been downloaded some fifty million times, spawning legions of imitators and earning Nguyen $50,000 a day in advertising revenue; that it took its cues from a genre of games characterised by their inherent masochism (like ‘Paddleball’) and that the first review of ‘Flappy Bird’ appeared on Twitter five months after its iOS release. It’s appropriately concise:
“Fuck Flappy Bird”.
You can read the full profile here.
