Flappy Turd
Gaming this past year had a bit of a resurgence with its retro roots, what with the Shovel Knights and the Minecraft getting released on Sony systems now. But there was also a rather infamous retro-looking game, and that’s Flappy Bird, a game where literally the entire objective is just to get the bird through the pipes. It’s as simple as game mechanics can get, really. Things changed when in early February, creator Dong Nguyen revealed that the game was gonna be yanked from the App Store and Google Play. Nguyen’s reasoning? He said, “It’s become an addictive product. I think it’s become a problem.” Wow, people getting addicted to playing a video game, stop the goddamn presses on that one!
The response to the pulling was, well… not good. People sent Nguyen death and murder threats via Twitter, enraged that the game was gone. He was, for his part, just happy to have his conscience cleared. Until about a month later in March when he didn’t rule out Flappy Bird ever coming back. Even better was when he announced that Flappy Bird would return, which it did in August, exclusively through the Amazon App store for the Amazon Fire TV. No word on when the game will return to the App Store and Google Play, or if this was all just some massive publicity stunt done because Amazon wanted it exclusively for them for a while. Whatever the case, this whole thing has left a bad mark on Nguyen and the Flappy Bird name. Alongside the billions of bastard offspring that spawned while it was gone.
