14 DAY TRIAL // Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen is roaming the hallways of GDC. Someone got hold of him to take a photo and received confirmation that the addictive avian platformer is making a comeback.
Todd Moore found Nguyen at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week. After taking a picture with the famous 28-year old from Hanoi, Vietnam, he asked him about Flappy Bird. To Moore’s surprise, Nguyen said the game was making a return.
“Creator of Flappy Bird found and he told me he is going to repost it to the App Store!!!” Moore wrote on Twitter.
More confirmation comes from Nguyen himself, who told a fan in a conversation on Twitter that Flappy Bird was indeed coming back to the App Store, “but not soon,” he said.
In an interview Nguyen revealed that he was pondering to return the game to the App Store, but noted that if he eventually did so, the game would come with a warning this time: “Please take a break.”
Nguyen’s success came after a Swedish game reviewer highlighted his annoying but addictive Flappy Bird game in a video on YouTube. The downloads started to grow to the point where Nguyen would rake in tens of thousands of dollars daily.
At the same time, he started receiving complaints from teachers and parents that the game was ruining people’s lives. He decided to pull it, recalling his own addiction to Counter Strike as a kid.
Nguyen showed signs of easing up in more recent interviews, where he also revealed that he was using the money earned with Flappy Bird to buy an apartment and a car he’d always wanted, a Mini Cooper.
When the 28-year-old decided to retract Flappy Bird from the App Store, fakes began to spring up like mushrooms after the rain. The Flappy Bird fever had suddenly reached a point where Apple was approving dozens of clones each day. None was as good as the original. Well, almost none.
The Flappy Bird phenomenon remains strong to this day. One of the top free downloads on iTunes, “The Impossible Flappy Game - The Adventure of a Tiny Bird” is a blatant ripoff that copies almost every aspect of the original. Nguyen seems fine with it.
Considering the release estimate, you shouldn’t be expecting Flappy to come back this week or the next. Whatever Nguyen means by “not soon,” it probably means a month or more.