So I need to talk about the bird. The stupid, stupid bird.
If you haven't seen it yet, count yourself lucky, because by this week I could not walk past a single desk in my office without seeing someone's thumb jabbing furiously at their phone screen, jaw clenched, muttering something under their breath. That's Flappy Bird. It's a free iPhone game that's basically just a pixelated yellow bird you tap to keep aloft while it flies through a series of green pipes straight out of Super Mario Bros. There's no story, no power-ups, no in-app purchases screaming at you. Just tap, die, tap, die, tap, die. And somehow it has climbed to the very top of the free app charts, ahead of stuff with actual marketing budgets behind it.
I got sucked in around Wednesday because my coworker Priya wouldn't shut up about her score (7, if you're wondering, and she was weirdly proud of it). I downloaded it on my lunch break and got a 2. A TWO. I am not a person who rage-quits things easily but I nearly threw my phone into my soup. The hitboxes feel unfair in a way that's hard to describe until you've played it — the bird looks like it's clearing a pipe and then it just doesn't, and you're staring at a game-over screen fourteen seconds after you started. My personal best after four days of on-and-off attempts is 11. Eleven! I have written actual production code that took me less effort to get right.
The part that gets me is how the guy who made it, a developer out in Vietnam named Dong Nguyen, apparently built this thing basically alone and it's been sitting in the App Store since last spring doing nothing much at all. Then sometime in the last couple of weeks something just clicked, probably a few YouTube videos, some Twitter screenshots of people's terrible scores, and now it's everywhere. No marketing campaign, no press push, nothing. It's a good reminder that the App Store is still, occasionally, a place where dumb luck and a genuinely annoying gameplay loop can beat out a studio with fifty designers on staff. I don't know how long that stays true as the store gets more crowded every year, but for now, credit where it's due.
Small aside because I can't help myself: this is also just a nice antidote to a week where the big tech story was Google selling off Motorola Mobility to Lenovo for something like $2.9 billion, barely two years after buying it for over ten times that to get at the patents. That's a fine story if you care about corporate strategy and patent portfolios, and I'm sure plenty of blogs this week are going to write the standard "what does this mean for Android" post. I don't have anything to add there that a dozen other people haven't already said better. But a free bird game beating actual billion-dollar deals for people's attention this week feels like the more honest snapshot of what tech actually is for most of us day to day. Nobody at my office was talking about Lenovo's supply chain synergies at lunch. Everyone was talking about the bird.
Anyway. I'm not proud of how much time I've sunk into this, and I'm even less proud that I just tried it again while writing this paragraph and got a 3, which is somehow worse than my score four days ago. There's something almost insulting about a game this simple humbling you that consistently. It's making me reconsider whether I've actually gotten worse at hand-eye coordination in my thirties or whether the game is just tuned by a sadist. Possibly both.
If you try it, don't say I didn't warn you. Set a timer. Tell someone where you'll be. And if you beat 11, I genuinely do not want to hear about it, Priya.