Flappy Bird

Flappy Bird is an arcade-style game in which the player controls the bird Faby, which moves persistently to the right. They are tasked with navigating Faby through pairs of pipes that have equally sized gaps placed at random heights. Faby automatically descends and only ascends when the player taps the touchscreen. Each successful pass through a pair of pipes awards the player one point.

Colliding with a pipe or the ground ends the gameplay. During the game over screen, the player is awarded a bronze medal if they reach ten or more points, a silver medal from twenty points, a gold medal from thirty points, and a platinum medal from forty points.

Dong Nguyen grew up in Vạn Phúc, a village near Hanoi. He discovered video games by playing Super Mario Bros. as a child and began coding his own at age 16. At 19, while studying programming at a local university, he won an internship at Punch Entertainment, one of the few video game companies in Vietnam. While using the iPhone, he found that its most popular games such as Angry Birds were too complicated, and wanted to make a simpler game for people who are "always on the move".

Flappy Bird was created and developed by Nguyen in two to three days. The game was originally called "Flap Flap". The bird character, Faby, was originally designed in 2012 for a cancelled platform game. The gameplay was inspired by the act of bouncing a ping pong ball against a paddle for as long as possible.

Flappy Bird received "mixed or average reviews" from critics, holding a Metacritic score of 52/100, based on seven reviews. The app was criticized by the Huffington Post, which described it as an "insanely irritating, difficult and frustrating game which combines a super-steep difficulty curve with bad, boring graphics and jerky movement". 4 out of 10, quipping that the game was as addictive as it was shallow. Despite criticizing its playability and its "no skill" requirement, IGN noted that the gameplay made it "an addictive short-term distraction" for the casual skill and score-obsessed players.

The game's difficulty has been a source of ire for many users, with one user stating that it took him half an hour to achieve a score of five points. According to its creator, the game is slightly easier on Android devices than on iOS.

Since the game's removal, numerous remakes and parodies have been spawned, such as Sesame Street's Flappy Bert and Fall Out Boy's Fall Out Bird. Flappy Bird became one of the most cloned games in Apple's App Store. At the peak of its popularity, over 60 clones per day were appearing on the App Store, prompting both Google and Apple to begin rejecting games with the word Flappy in the name. CNET reviewed seven "Flappy copycats" for iOS two days after the original game's removal, describing the options as "pretty bleak", but singling out the underwater Splashy Fish as the closest approximation of Flappy Bird.

Shortly after the game's removal, security researchers warned that some versions of Flappy Bird and its imitators available on alternative Android app stores have been found to contain malware that can lead to unauthorised charges to a user's phone bills. The number matching game Threes has been compared to Flappy Bird because of the similarities between how people react to them and by the chain of clones that they are both respectively part of.