On the pages of the March issue of Rolling Stone appeared the story of the creation of one of the main phenomena of the mobile games market this year – the game Flappy Bird.
In the article, 28-year-old Vietnamese programmer Dong Nguyen tells David Kushner, a Rolling Stone journalist, about himself, how he developed Flappy Bird and why he cut the game out of the store.
According to Dong, he always dreamed of creating a game for people like him: busy all the time, those who are constantly on their feet.
“I have imprinted in my head how people play: one hand on the handrail of the subway car, the other holds the phone vertically.” Flappy Bird Dong made it for such users, keeping in mind the following thing: “when you play on a smartphone, it’s best when you can just tap on the screen.”
Dong, as before, claims that he did not spend a cent to promote the project. The popularity of the game came only five months after the release. And attention was attracted, first of all, not by the game itself, but by the negative reaction to it. Users who played Flappy Bird scolded her, hated her, smashed smartphones against the walls because of her, but at the same time continued to play.
Over time, the game, according to Dong, began to bring him $ 50 thousand a day. This instantly made the guy from a not very rich family one of the main stars of the Vietnamese media.
The creator of Flappy Bird was not ready either for the aggressive reaction of users to the game (one of the women told Dong that 13 children at her school broke their phones because of his game about a bird), or for the attention of compatriots to his person (he was hosted by one of the ministers of the country, paparazzi constantly revolved around Dong).
And at a certain point, Nguyen apparently decided that he could stop all this by simply deleting the game from the app stores. However, to David’s direct question why he deleted the game after all, Dong replied: “I am the master of my destiny, an independent thinker.”
How to interpret it? Perhaps Nguyen just didn’t want to depend on what he had created.
In the last 22 hours before Flappy Bird was removed from the stores, the game was downloaded 10 million times. And, yes, the game still makes money.
Now Dong is planning to buy a Mini Cooper and an apartment (so that he no longer lives with his parents). He quit his job where he developed mobile apps, and wants to devote his time to what he loves most – developing games.
And, yes, now he is thinking about whether it is worth returning Flappy Bird to mobile shelves.
The original in English can be found here.
A source: http://www.rollingstone.com/Photo:
Maika Elan (http://www.rollingstone.com)