Flappy Bird is finally returning to iOS and Android. But the original creator is not happy about it at all.
Vietnamese developer Dong Nguyen shared this statement on his Twitter account:
“No, I have no related with their game. I did not sell anything.
I also don’t support crypto.”
This was a reaction to a tweet from last week from a new Twitter account announcing the pending return of Flappy Bird. It said:
“Just a decade ago, I was the talk of the town and soaring to new heights with my 100 million friends. Sadly, I had to leave the fame and spotlight behind to go home and find out who I really am.
Thanks to my super Flappy Bird® fans, I’m refreshed, reinvigorated, and ready to soar again. The decade-long mission involved acquiring legal rights and even working with my predecessor to uncage me and re-hatch the official Flappy Bird® game!”
As Twitter user SamNChiet revealed in his own thread, a company named GameTech Holdings seems to have acquired the trademark for Flappy Bird after Ha Dong seemingly abandoned it.
Video Games Chronicle then reported that Gametech did register the trademark for Flappy Bird, who then sold it to “a team of fans calling itself the Flappy Bird Foundation.”
It may certainly be a bit hard to parse through what to make of this, so let me remind you, what even was Flappy Bird? Releasing on iOS and Android a decade ago, this was a mobile game where you had to tap the screen to keep the eponymous bird flying. The vertical playscreen was blocked by several pipes, but you could pass through openings in between the pipes to keep going.
Because of Flappy Bird‘s viral success, it faced allegations of being fraudulent in some way. But perhaps more famously, Flappy Bird was pulled from iOS and Android shortly after it went famous, with Nguyen claiming the game’s fame led to him developing mental health issues.
Now, what most people may not know is that Nguyen still has a Flappy Bird game available for sale. Flappy Bird Family was also published on Amazon Game Store all the way back in 2014, but it was never pulled from sale. You can see its official web page on Nguyen’s company website here. There are questions on the legitimacy of the Flappy Bird Foundation’s claim that they own the IP rights to Flappy Bird. But since this is a legal matter, we can’t really make any clear judgements on that. To understand how complicated this can be, you can read our report on how Mickey Mouse was used in a video game without Disney, thanks to his public domain status.
Video Games Chronicle also reported on allegations that this project has connections to crypto. As a reminder, Palworld has long standing allegations of crypto connections as well. Pocketpair and their owners may surprise us yet in the future, but we shouldn’t put weight on allegations and suspicions.
The truth is, this situation is already suspicious without those allegations. It’s suspect for supposed Flappy Bird fans to claim that they are bringing the game back without the original creator’s involvement. It’s even more suspicious that their announcement tweet made it sound like the fictional mascot bird experienced the mental health issues that Dong Nguyen, the game’s developer and a real human person, went through. They were definitely banking on fans who won’t remember the whole story assuming that this means everything was OK now and that the game is finally back.
Whether they talk to Dong Nguyen, or prove the skeptics right or wrong, we can probably expect the Flappy Bird Foundation to make some future communications. So we’ll see what’s really going on here soon enough.
