The classic mobile game Flappy Bird was announced to be returning this week, but it’s not coming back in the way you might think.
I’m not going to ask you if you remember Flappy Bird, because of course you do, everyone does. It’s a pretty good mobile game that went viral about a decade ago in a way that mobile games can’t do anymore, eventually leading its creator Dong Nguyen to pull it from the App Store entirely due to its popularity and pressure delete. Earlier this week, a surprising piece of news revealed that Flappy Bird would be returning, spearheaded by an organization called the Flappy Bird Foundation.
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The organization claims to be a “new team of passionate fans dedicated to sharing the game with the world” (via IGN), and this new version of the game will feature new modes, characters, and massive multiplayer challenges. Kek is the developer of a game called Piou Piou, which Flappy Bird may or may not have copied, but it’s worth noting that Flappy Bird creator Nguyen was not involved. It turns out that Gametech Holdings, which now owns the Flappy Bird trademark, appears to have simply treated it as abandoned, filing a lawsuit against Nguyen and taking it away without having to pay the developer anything.
Some online users then began noticing that the Flappy Bird account was following a bunch of cryptocurrency and NFT accounts on Twitter (it has since seemingly unfollowed them), and in addition to Forbes reporting, the game’s ads There’s a direct reference to Web 3.0, so yes, you can probably expect some blockchain nonsense in Flappy Bird’s future.
In turn, after the whole debacle, for the first time in seven years he took to Twitter to make it clear that he had nothing to do with the new version of the game and was not selling anything, also stating very pointedly that he did not support cryptocurrencies. Essentially, this whole thing is a mess, and you should go to Google and play Flappy Bird on any of the sites that recreate it – that’s better if you need to fix fluttering issues.
