Flappy Bird is gone. As of sometime early this morning, Dong Nguyen actually did the thing he said he'd do on Twitter two days ago and yanked it from the App Store and Google Play. I refreshed the App Store on my phone around 9am before coffee, half expecting it to still be sitting there at the top of the free chart like it had been for what feels like three straight weeks, and instead there was just... nothing. Search "flappy" now and you get a wall of knockoffs with names like "Flappy Bee" and "Splashy Fish," which is its own kind of funny.
I want to be honest about something: I was never good at this game. My high score, after probably four separate multi-day binges of trying, tops out at 17. I've seen people post screenshots in the 40s and 50s and I genuinely do not believe them, or if I do believe them I think they have a problem. The whole mechanic is one tap, over and over, threading a bird through green pipes spaced about a bird-and-a-half apart, and it punishes you instantly and completely for being off by a pixel. There's no ramp-up, no tutorial, no mercy. You die in about four seconds the first fifty times you play it and somehow that's the hook.
The backstory, if you've somehow missed it, is that Nguyen is one guy in Hanoi who made this thing in a couple of days last spring as basically a side project, and it sat around doing nothing for months before it started climbing the charts in January out of nowhere. No marketing, no PR push, nothing. Then it spent something like three weeks at number one on the App Store, ahead of Candy Crush, ahead of Angry Birds, ahead of everything, and by most accounts was pulling in something like $50,000 a day off ads. Then two days ago he tweeted, out of nowhere, that he was taking it down in 22 hours because he "cannot take this anymore," and this morning it's actually gone.
People are speculating hard about why, and I don't think anyone outside his group chats actually knows for sure. The going theories are some mix of him hating the sudden attention, hating getting accused of designing the thing to be deliberately addictive (there were a bunch of pieces last week practically calling him predatory for it, which felt like a stretch to me, but whatever), and just being a guy who didn't sign up to become a global tech story over a bird made of six pixels. I have zero interest in psychoanalyzing a stranger over Twitter, but I'll say this much: pulling a free app that was making you an absurd amount of passive money, on purpose, because it was stressing you out, is a genuinely rare thing to watch a person do. Most of tech runs on the opposite instinct.
There are already eBay listings for phones with Flappy Bird pre-installed going for hundreds of dollars. One I saw was bid up past $300 before eBay presumably pulls it for violating whatever rule that breaks. That part I find more depressing than funny. It's two pipes and a bird sprite and somehow it's turned into a weird overnight collectibles economy. I don't think anyone involved in that auction is going to feel great about it in six months, and I say that as someone who once bought a "rare" domain name in 2009 for way more than it was worth, so I'm not exactly throwing stones from a great height here.
(Also, yes, I know Microsoft got a new CEO last week and I have thoughts on that too, but everyone with a keyboard has already written that post four times over by now, so I'll leave it alone today.)
If you've already got Flappy Bird on your phone, hang onto it, because apparently it's not coming back down from wherever Nguyen sent it. Mine's staying right where it is on my home screen, unbeaten high score and all, right next to Twitter, which this whole thing is a decent reminder can still occasionally produce a story that isn't about outrage or somebody trying to sell you a phone plan.