The Flappy Bird Story: Why Its Creator Deleted a $50,000-a-Day Game
Not every creator wants their life consumed by what they've made. Nguyen just wanted to make fun games. Flappy
In early 2014, a simple mobile game with pixel graphics and one-button gameplay took over the world. Flappy Bird wasn’t just a game. It was an obsession.
People smashed phones in frustration. Teachers confiscated devices in classrooms. The game sparked thousands of social media posts daily, most beginning with “Fuck Flappy Bird” before admitting they couldn’t stop playing. At its peak, the creator was earning $50,000 per day from advertising alone.
Then, without warning, he deleted it. The Flappy Bird story had just taken its most shocking turn.
The Accidental Hit
Dong Nguyen created Flappy Bird over a weekend in April 2013. The 28-year-old lived with his parents in Hanoi, Vietnam, and had a day job programming location devices for taxis. He wanted to make something simple but challenging, inspired by the Nintendo games he grew up playing.
The concept was brutally simple: tap the screen to make a bird flap through gaps between green pipes. Tap too much, the bird flies too high. Tap too little, it drops. The game tested timing and patience. Nothing more.
Nguyen launched it on the iOS App Store on 24 May 2013. He made it free, hoping to earn a few hundred dollars monthly from in-game adverts. With about 25,000 new apps going live every month, Flappy Bird disappeared into the flood. For months, it looked like a complete bust.
Then something crazy happened.
The Viral Explosion
Eight months after launch, in November 2013, downloads slowly began in the US. By December, volume increased 25 times compared to November. In January 2014, downloads jumped 136 percent day by day.
On 17 January 2014, Flappy Bird reached number one in the US App Store. An obscure game nobody had noticed became the most downloaded app on the platform. On 24 January, Nguyen released an Android version. Within a week, it topped Google Play too.
The numbers became absurd. By February 2014, Flappy Bird had been downloaded over 50 million times across more than 100 countries. The game topped charts in 53 countries simultaneously. Nguyen’s Twitter account gained 148,000 followers almost overnight.
Swedish YouTuber PewDiePie reviewed the game, and that seemed to trigger the avalanche. Everyone was talking about Flappy Bird on social media. Players competed to beat high scores. The game’s brutal difficulty made it simultaneously infuriating and addictive.
Nguyen was earning an estimated $50,000 daily from in-app advertisements. That’s $18 million per year. Not even Mark Zuckerberg got rich that fast.
The Dark Side of Fame
Nguyen never expected any of this. He’d made other games before. None caught fire. He didn’t market Flappy Bird beyond a couple of tweets. He had no strategy, no plan, no team. Just a simple game he’d built in a few days.
The sudden fame overwhelmed him. He avoided interviews, refused to be photographed, and barely spoke about his success. His parents only found out when they saw his photo in Vietnamese news reports.
Then the criticism started. Bloggers accused him of stealing art from Nintendo. The popular gaming site Kotaku ran a headline: “Flappy Bird Is Making $50,000 A Day Off Ripped Art.” People called him a fraud, a con man, a thief. Some accused him of buying fake reviews and using bots to manipulate app rankings.
The game’s addictive nature became controversial. Parents complained he was distracting their children. Players sent messages about breaking their phones in frustration. Schools banned the game. Media coverage turned increasingly negative.
Nguyen started feeling guilty. The game he’d made for fun was ruining people’s days. It was causing stress, anger, and obsession. The attention, pressure, and criticism crushed him. His simple life in Hanoi had vanished. The Flappy Bird story was becoming a nightmare.
On 9 February 2014 at 2:02 am Hanoi time, a message appeared on his Twitter account: “I am sorry ‘Flappy Bird’ users. 22 hours from now, I will take ‘Flappy Bird’ down. I cannot take this anymore.”
The message was retweeted over 145,000 times by disbelieving masses. In those final 22 hours, 10 million people downloaded the game. Then, exactly on schedule, Nguyen deleted Flappy Bird from both the App Store and Google Play.
The Aftermath
The internet went mad. Users couldn’t believe someone would walk away from $50,000 daily. Some insisted it was a marketing stunt. Others claimed legal threats from Nintendo forced the removal. Nintendo denied this publicly.
Nguyen later explained to Rolling Stone magazine: “It was just making something fun to share with other people. I couldn’t predict the success of Flappy Bird.” He described feeling relief after removing it. “I can’t go back to my life before, but I’m good now.”
Clones flooded the market immediately. Within days, a new Flappy Bird knock-off appeared every 24 minutes. Apple and Google tried blocking them, but hundreds got through. None captured the original’s magic or momentum.
Phones with Flappy Bird still installed began selling on eBay for thousands of pounds. Some listings reached £10,000 or more. People were paying absurd prices just to play a deleted game.
In August 2014, Nguyen released Flappy Birds Family exclusively for Amazon Fire TV. This revised version included multiplayer options and was designed to be less addictive. He’d learned his lesson about creating games that consumed people’s lives.
The Rise and the Cost of Viral Success
Flappy Bird’s story shows that viral success can be as destructive as failure. Not every creator dreams of fame. Some just want to create in peace.
Nguyen never asked for any of it. He built a simple game over a weekend holiday. He shared it hoping a few people might enjoy it. Eight months later, it became a global phenomenon he could not control.
The money did not matter. Fifty thousand dollars daily could not compensate for the harassment, media scrutiny, guilt, and pressure. His mental health deteriorated under the spotlight. The game that made him rich was destroying his life.
The tech world often celebrates viral success as the ultimate goal. Build something, make it go viral, get rich. Flappy Bird proved that formula is not always desirable. Sometimes the lottery ticket you win comes with costs you never imagined.
Flappy Bird taught an uncomfortable truth: you cannot always control what you create once it enters the world. Sometimes success happens to you, not for you. And when it does, you are allowed to say no.
Choosing Peace Over Profit
Walking away from millions takes courage most people cannot imagine. But Nguyen chose peace over profit. He chose his simple life in Hanoi over wealth and fame. That decision earned him something more valuable than money, control over his own life again.
Nguyen continues making games with his company DotGears, based in Hanoi. He works quietly, away from spotlights. His other games have seen modest success without overwhelming his life.
In 2024, a company called Gametech Holdings announced plans to relaunch Flappy Bird after acquiring the trademark. Nguyen quickly clarified on Twitter that he has no connection with this game and did not sell any rights. Even a decade later, he wants nothing to do with his accidental creation.
Not every creator wants their life consumed by what they have made. Nguyen just wanted to make fun games. Flappy Bird took that away from him. So he took Flappy Bird away from the world.
Fair exchange.
