Terrible or terribly addictive? The viral video game phenomenon of Flappy Bird

Programmed by one man - Vietnamese developer Dong Nguyen - Flappy Bird is one of today's most popular games for mobile devices

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The starting screen of Flappy Bird encourages players to "get ready" - for the game's maddening difficulty. Photo: SCMP Pictures

Published: 9:30pm, 4 Feb 2014Updated: 7:07pm, 11 Feb 2014

Flappy Bird is a viral video game phenomenon. Sitting at the top of the Apple iOS and Google Play stores, the game is currently being downloaded by an estimated two to three million people per day.

Programmed by .Gears, a one man company headed by Vietnamese developer Dong Nguyen, Flappy Bird’s rise to superstardom is an odd one.

The game is a simple affair, where players must tap the screen to make a chubby, pixelated little bird – sometimes resembling a disembodied penguin head with wings – fly between gaps of green pipes that bear more than a passing resemblance to those from Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros.

And that is Flappy Bird in a nutshell. There are no levels, no special achievements to unlock and no variation in gameplay whatsoever. There is only a bird which flops to the ground with a loud “thwack” if players fail to avoid the incoming pipes.

In the words of technology website TechCrunch, Flappy Bird is nothing more than “an awful little thing [to] play in spare chunks of time when you only have seconds…to kill in between some other activity.”

But the game is also highly difficult, which may explain its appeal. Managing to fly the bird past the first few pipes requires a certain rhythm, and obtaining a high score requires players to maintain that rhythm as the pipes become increasingly trickier to avoid.