Flappy Bird: The Tiny Game Its Creator Deleted at the Height of Its Fame

In early February 2014, a young developer in Hanoi had the most downloaded game in the world. It was reportedly making him $50,000 a day from in-game ads. And on 8 February he posted that in 22 hours he would take it down. He was serious.

That was Flappy Bird, made by Vietnamese developer Dong Nguyen under his company .GEARS and released on iOS on 24 May 2013. After months of near silence, it topped the US and Chinese free charts in January 2014, and then on 10 February 2014, at the height of its fame, it disappeared from the App Store and Google Play. Few stories in mobile gaming are stranger.

One tap, one bird, a lot of pipes

Flappy Bird asks almost nothing of you. Tap the screen and the bird flaps upward; stop tapping and it falls. Guide it through the gaps between green pipes. Touch anything and you die, which you will, constantly.

That's the whole game, and its brutal difficulty was the point. A score of 10 felt like an achievement. A score of 50 earned bragging rights at school. Every failure took a second and every restart was instant, so "one more go" became a hundred more goes. The chunky pixel art and the pipes drew comparisons to Super Mario Bros., which only added to its retro charm.

From nowhere to No. 1

By January 2014, Flappy Bird was No. 1 on the free charts in the US and China and topped the UK chart too. It was the most downloaded App Store app of the month, and an Android version arrived on 30 January 2014. Nguyen told The Verge that the game was earning around $50,000 a day from advertising.

Then came the backlash and the attention. Journalists wanted interviews, critics argued about whether such a simple game deserved its success, and the developer, by his own account, did not enjoy any of it.

The day the bird flew away

On 8 February 2014, Nguyen announced he would remove the game, and on 10 February it was gone. He said the game had become too addictive and that he felt guilty about it, and he insisted that legal issues played no part. "It's gone forever," he told Forbes.

The vacuum was filled immediately by imitators. Nguyen hinted at a return with a "take a break" warning and, in August 2014, released Flappy Birds Family, a multiplayer version exclusive to Amazon's Fire TV. His next game, Swing Copters, kept the same punishing one-tap spirit.

The unofficial comeback

Ten years later the bird came back, but not from its creator. Nguyen's trademark lapsed and was terminated in January 2024, and it passed to a company called Gametech Holdings. In September 2024, a group calling itself The Flappy Bird Foundation announced a reboot with new characters and modes, releasing it on the web in late 2024 and on mobile in 2025.

Nguyen made his position clear: he said he had no connection to the revival, had sold no rights, and did not support crypto, which the reboot was reported to involve.

Why it matters

Flappy Bird proved that a single developer with a tiny game could beat the biggest studios in the world on the App Store, if only for a few weeks. It showed the strange power of virality, and its creator's choice to walk away from a fortune remains one of the most human moments in the history of the games business.

Because the original is no longer sold, there is no official place to play Nguyen's game today. For more quick-fire classics from the same era, read our histories of Fruit Ninja and Temple Run.