Flappy Bird Copycats Keep on Flapping

March 1, 2014 Leave a comment

FEBRUARY 24, 2014, 5:14 PM  Comment

Flappy Bird Copycats Keep on Flapping

By NICK BILTON

On Feb. 9, the Western world fell into chaos as Flappy Bird, a highly addictive game, was removed from mobile app stores by Dong Nguyen, an independent developer in Vietnam.

Since then, people have scrambled to create clones of Flappy Bird, including Fly Birdie, Flappy Bee, Flappy Plane and Ironpants, to satiate the addictive gaming habits of smartphone owners.

Flappy Bird has continued to take on an almost cultlike following with game developers and consumers.

You can now buy Flappy Bird-themed T-shirts, mugs, neckties,sweaters, iPhone cases, wristwatches, pillows and jewelry. There are even crocheted Flappy Bird hats for sale on Etsy to keep you warm during these cold winter months.

Flappy Wings, which calls itself a “parody” of Flappy Birds, is the most downloaded free app for Apple‘s iOS. Splashy Fish, a sort of Flappy Birds underwater, is the third-most-popular free app on iOS. There’s also a Hoppy Frog in the top charts, which — you guessed it — uses a frog instead of a bird.

While Mr. Nguyen no longer sells Flappy Bird, in addition to the clones of the game, people have ported it to dozens of other platforms, beyond just smartphones.

Last week, a developer made a cubelike version of Flappy Bird for Minecraft. Another developer created a version that can run on the Commodore 64, an 8-bit home computer that went on sale in 1982 from Commodore International. There is now an ASCII version, which uses just standard characters used in The American Standard Code for Information Interchange, originally based on the English alphabet. And in one of the most impressive instances, the game has been ported to a Texas Instrument graphics calculator.

When the original game was taken down in early February, Mr. Nguyen said he pulled the game from the App Store because it was “an addictive product.”

It seem that given the obsession still swirling around Flappy Bird, our obsessive flapping won’t be ending anytime soon.

 

Filed under TMT Trends

Unknown's avatarAbout bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

Leave a comment