The wild, intense rise and fall of Flappy Bird
TL;DR
Flappy Bird was a deceptively simple mobile game where players tapped to navigate a bird through pipes. Despite its simplicity, it became a global phenomenon in 2014, topping app charts and capturing cultural attention before its creator removed it.
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Flappy Bird was almost preposterously simple. If you ever played the game, even once, you surely remember how it worked, but here's a summary just in case. You were a bird. Your job was to fly, left to right, for as long as possible without crashing into the green Mario-ish pipes coming from both the top and bottom of the screen. Tap the screen to go up, stop tapping to go down. That's it. That's the game.
Nobody, not even Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen, thought those were the ingredients for a smash hit. And yet for a few weeks in 2014, the game was at the top of app stores everywhere - and became something of a cultural phenomenon. Almos …