Flappy Bird: An American Tragedy

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28 Days of Fame: The Strange, True Story of 'Flappy Bird'

In just a few weeks, the mobile app Flappy Bird became a global phenomenon. It was a simple game, but frustrating and endless. Sharing many similarities with the famous Helicopter Game — only with Super Nintendo-style graphics — it's safe to say Flappy Bird took over the web.

The game was designed and built by Dong Nguyen, a developer who lives in Vietnam. Nguyen previously made a number of iOS and flash games for his mobile studio .Gears.

The story of Flappy Bird — its sudden rise and equally sudden fall — is hard to pin down. That's partially because Nguyen, overwhelmed by the popularity of the game, has declined press requests for interviews. [Update: Shortly after we posted this story, Forbes tracked down Nguyen in Hanoi, where he revealed that Flappy Bird is "gone forever' because, essentially, it was addictive.]

Still, using Twitter data from Topsy, Nguyen's Twitter stream and app-ranking data from App Annie, we've managed to put together a timeline of the game.

Much of the data surrounding Flappy Bird and its viral success came courtesy of Zach Williams, a developer who analyzed the numbers behind the game.

 

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[thundley4]

The first time I heard of it was in a story saying the creator had withdrawn it.

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The first time I heard of it was in a story saying the creator had withdrawn it.

We have a 1:1 iPad program in my school. It was an amazing sensation for about 2 weeks.