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Do you remember Flappy Bird? Back in 2013, it was an addictive and frustrating game that turned players into true junkies and brought creator Dong Nguyen an unexpected fame and fortune.
If you never played it, let us sum up the game’s main features for you: everything you had to do was to guide a small non – aerodynamic bird through a series of pipes, just by tapping on the smartphone’s screen. The thing was, if you crashed the bird into an obstacle or didn’t manage to keep it floating, the game was over and you had to start all over again. Imagine cohorts of people not giving up after the first try…
Translated into real life, reports showed that a gazillion of people got addicted to the game and turned it into an incredible hit.
It was so successful, Dong Nguyen was making around $50,000 in ad revenue per day. On a less positive note, the game received a lot of critique for its addictive features and Nguyen felt suddenly under tons of pressure, both professionally and personally. He felt somehow guilty for delivering the world just another dangerous drug and decided to forever remove the game from the app marketplace.
This took place in February this year, but after a few months of silence, Nguyen resurfaced and spread the word: Flappy Bird returns, with new and improved features and a less – addictive potential. In an interview for CNBC on Wednesday, Nguyen revealed that the game would return sometime August this year and would bring a multiplayer version. This somehow changes completely the notion of “gone forever”, but we are not the ones to judge.
According to the journalists who covered the topic,
The new version will be enabled for multi-player gaming, so you and your fellow addicts can complete in real time. Nguyen also plans to make the new version of the game less addictive to users, though how he plans to do that is unclear. Nguyen could create levels within the game, so users don’t have to start from scratch every time their bird crashes. He could also create a tiered difficulty system. Regardless, based on the craze that resulted from the first release of the game, Flappy Bird 2.0 will still breed some serious addicts.
Now that we know Flappy Bird returns, we can’t wait to see it and burn our fingertips in order to keep that bird flying. After Nguyen removed the original game from the app stores, a myriad of copycats invaded the world. Some of these almost identical games witnessed certain levels of success, but most of them were clearly inferior to the Flappy Bird. As we said, we still don’t have details on the exact changes Ngyuen plans for the game, but there is still a lot of time to find out!
