A Merrimack student plays “Flappy Bird”
Flappy Bird is a mobile application game created by a Vietnamese Company called, “GEARS Studio” and invented by Dong Nguyen. The mobile game has already become extremely popular within the past few weeks. The goal of the game is to pass all different levels and weave the Flappy Bird in and out of pipes without the bird hitting one. Flappy Bird might seem similar to games like Angry Birds or Plants vs. Zombies, but the design of Flappy Bird is much more intricate. Players become addicted to the game because of the challenge it poses on the player. Eventually, companies like Google, Apple and Samsung banned downloading Flappy Bird online in their app stores.
A survey on Merrimack’s campus asked all about Flappy Bird with questions such as, “Have you ever heard of Flappy Bird?”, “Do you have the Flappy Bird app on your phone?”, and “Have you ever played Flappy Bird before?” 18 out of 20 students have heard Flappy Bird, 15 of 20 students have the game on their phones and 13 out of 20 students are still playing the game everyday. “It was so challenging, I couldn’t stop playing it for four hours,” said Jiaxi Gu ’15. “I will delete the game once I achieved level 50. It took me a week from level 40 to 45,” said JunFeng Tong ’16.
Since the prohibition of downloading Flappy Bird, there are games like “Splashy Fish”, and “Juggling” exist. The principles of those games are the same as Flappy Bird. Moreover, an iPhone that has Flappy Bird installed on it is worth $1,000 on eBay. The most updated news from the Flappy Bird game is that it will be back again for downloading when they have 100,000 likes on their official Facebook page, but it has not been confirmed yet. Flappy bird has become the #1 game in a short period of time, and it’s guaranteed once they put the mobile game app back in app stores that it will become #1 again.
