Vietnamese guy makes the world crazy with Flappy Bird game

The world is crazy about a new mobile game that is extremely simple but difficult: Flappy Bird by a young Vietnamese man Nguyen Ha Dong

Growing rapidly

On the App Store (for iOS devices) and Google Play (for Android devices), the number of downloads for this game has increased rapidly. Flappy Bird has now become the number 1 free app. And what is more remarkable is that the author of Flappy Bird is a Vietnamese independent game developer named Nguyen Ha Dong, 29 years old, living in Hanoi.

Flappy Bird game has very simple graphics

Currently, on the App Store, Ha Dong alone has three game applications in the Top 10 of the free game apps list: Flappy Bird (number 1), Super Ball Juggling (number 2) and Shuriken Block (number 6).

According to the tech website TechCrunch, as of February 2014, around 300,000 iOS users had rated Flappy Bird. Many left lengthy comments with comments and suggestions, and generally said: “The only reason I haven’t deleted this horrible game is the overwhelming feeling of relief and accomplishment I feel when I finally beat a high score.”

In an email interview with TechCrunch, author Ha Dong said he has been developing games for 4 years. Most of them are “arcade games” (i.e. simple games that run on coin-operated game machines). These are very small games that only take a few minutes to play through a level on smartphones and tablets.

“Our work is heavily influenced by the old pixelated games of the golden age of the genre,” Dong says. “Everything was clean, clear, and incredibly difficult, but incredibly fun to play.” Dong is now mostly still developing simple games that take just a few minutes to play on a smartphone or tablet, but with the requirement to be “both difficult and fun.”

Vietnamese guy "just likes to work quietly"

TechCrunch said that Nguyen Ha Dong does not like to appear in public, just works quietly. He refuses to give information about himself. He has a Twitter account and participates in the site HTML5gamedevs.com to discuss game application development with people. Even the official website .GEARS (with a dot in front) is very simple, there is no line about the authors of the games or about them. Some people also doubt that Nguyen Ha Dong is just a nickname to refer to a person with the last name Nguyen in Ha Dong town, a locality now merged into Hanoi.

Nguyen told TechCrunch that he was the sole creator of .GEARS, which he founded and runs. He revealed that it took him only 2-3 days to complete Flappy Bird and that he reused graphics from other games. He emphasized: “.GEARS is not a company. It’s just me now, but I have to use the phrase ‘we are open to changes in the future.’ Before Flappy Bird, none of my games had even reached 1% of its popularity.”

Flappy Bird was released by Ha Dong on the App Store in May 2013 and has since become a hit, pushing it to the top of the free game charts. Every day, there are 2-3 million downloads of this game on both iOS and Android.

“I had no idea my game would be so popular,” Ha Dong told TechCrunch. “Most of the players are students. I want to thank them for playing my game and sharing it with others.”

Regarding the game's difficulty, the author asserts that there is no situation that players cannot overcome. "In all my games, the Platinum Medal score is the highest score I achieved at the time I released these applications." He only advises players not to push "too hard and too fast".

Regarding the future, Ha Dong said he plans to update the games Flappy Bird, Super Ball Juggling, and Shuriken Block right away. He will also try to release a new iOS game with the cat character from his existing HTML5 game Smashing Kitty but with a completely different gameplay mechanism.

Ha Dong said he has never used any advertising methods for Flappy Bird or his other games. The accounts introducing this game on social networks are all from fans who help promote the community. But now this game has become a phenomenon from many angles, from the mobile world, the gaming community, to the world of application software development, e-business, to even startups in the technology era. Too many websites and famous newspapers such as Forbes, Huffington Post, Atlantic, Cnet, Time, USA Today, Reuters, PC Magazine... have written articles about Flappy Bird.

Matt Peckham, a journalist specializing in video games for the American magazine Time, wrote an article on Time's Tech page about Flappy Bird on February 3, 2014. He confessed that the highest score he had achieved up to the time of writing this article was only 6 points. But that was enough to beat many of his friends. Meanwhile, on the online scoreboard, there are currently more than 18 million people around the world registered, the person with the highest score is up to 9,999 points. And to achieve that score, one must type on the screen up to 10,000 times, if on average, 2 words per second, it would take up to 83 minutes of continuous typing. What a torture.

That is why the Atlantic (February 3, 2014) classified Flappy Bird as a Masocore game (suffering to score points), which included such popular titles as Mega Man, I Wanna Be The Guy and Super Meat Boy. This is a “frustrating” game with “trial and error” scenarios, making players repeatedly encounter the “Game over” screen until they go crazy, then get drawn back to play from the first level, increasingly eager to overcome themselves.

The description of this game is simple: Flap your wings to fly. How to play: flap your wings to fly. Avoid the pipes. Try to get 4 medals: bronze, silver, gold (hard) and platinum (very hard).

Attractive "little pepper" game

Reading through the latest comments from players around the world, one can see that this "tiny pepper" game is unexpectedly attractive.

Just looking at the gameplay and graphics, it seems simple, but Flappy Bird is only easy in the first two levels for those who want to have a little fun, then they can try their hand. For those who want to challenge themselves to level 3 and level 4, it is extremely difficult. Many mobile game enthusiasts say that this game is harder than ever. But it is also attractive because of the community features provided such as players can share their scores via Facebook, Twitter, SMS or email, as well as invite friends to play with them. And the main thing is that the game has a "teasing" nature that makes people easily frustrated: "It's so easy, why can't I win?" Nubia Carreon had to confess on February 3, 2014 that she was addicted to this game.

Someone Random123 in the iOS community, after giving Flippy Bird a 5/5, wrote: “Flappy Bird is by far the most annoying game you will ever play in your life. It will make you scream and scream (I'm not kidding).” You add: “The game itself is nothing special. It’s just a bird that somehow looks like a falling brick in the form of a bird. The bird basically falls to its death just as you’re about to reach a new high score. It’s almost like the bird has a heart attack while flying or commits suicide on a glass pane. The bird also defies physics, falling faster and even farther than it should and thus ending your range of sanity and happiness. The game isn’t fun but it is addictive. The joy you feel after beating your record is indescribable and the anger that seethes inside you will only make you hope you can play again and do better. This will convince you to keep playing.”

From their own experiences, many players around the world are giving suggestions to improve this game. Most of them suggest adding a pause button. Pause to relieve tired fingers and reduce stress.

When people first see the bird image, they immediately think of the Angry Bird game that has been popular on mobile for a long time. When they see the green pipes, they think of the old Super Mario Bros. game. And looking at the overall simple graphics, they seem to be back in the days of Nintendo's 8-bit games. To this day, in the era of computer and console games that increasingly require heavy graphics and computing power, Nintendo game emulators to play old video games are still popular. The advantage of these "nostalgic" games now is that they have more powerful, more beautiful, more convenient devices, and especially the touch screen.

Success from simplicity

Flappy Bird is not a new game. It does not use any sophisticated algorithms or complex gameplay, and even reuses graphics from old games. But it is that challenging simplicity that has made the game popular with the mobile community, which is overwhelmingly composed of users who only need simple and convenient operations, and just want to be entertained without having to think too hard. The factor that makes Flappy Bird successful is simply how the author knows how to think.

There are simple things that become great successes. Flappy Bird is the latest example. With the craze of Flappy Bird, the author immediately became a global celebrity. There are even people excitedly saying that Ha Dong can become a USD millionaire. To be fair, if that happens, it is also a proud thing for Vietnamese people.

As for whether the current craze and the game Flappy Bird itself cause any harm to society, that is another aspect, somewhat like the story of the “knife”, the benefit or harm depends on the user. I think that those who complain that Flappy Bird makes people go crazy, angry, or take it out on others… are just due to the nature of each player. In this world, anything that is abused will do more harm than good! Well, I will stop here to continue to overcome myself with the challenges with Flappy Bird!

According to VOV