Flappy Bird was a game that was always surrounded by controversy.
Right from the time when it was first released, to the time that its developer decided to pull the game off the markets, Flappy Bird has seen its share of criticism and controversy. Yet, the game continued to gain popularity. Now that the game’s developer, Dong Nguyen, has declared that he is considering the bringing Flappy Bird back, all the controversy that the game was steeped in, comes back to haunt it. There were allegations of plagiarism, and there were many games made before, which were all very similar to Flappy Bird. Here’s a look at what happened.
Flappy Bird Promotions
The sudden success of Flappy Bird, brought it under the radar several times. Dong himself credited the game’s sudden rise to luck and claimed that he had not used any promotional methods for making the game popular. However, a lot of online marketers were simply not satisfied with this simple logic of ‘luck’. Some even went as far as to suggest the liberal use of bots to bring about the success. When Dong was asked to comment on this speculation, he gave several vague answers and declined to say anything substantial about it, asking everyone to leave him in peace so that he could make his games.
Ripped Off Art
It is no secret that a huge appeal of the game is in its simplistic design. This was a paradigm shifting approach to gaming, because traditional gaming companies spend a lot of time and money in perfecting their graphics and the general appearance of their game. The success of Flappy Bird was off putting all those who thought that the graphics of the game went a long way towards enhancing the gaming experience. Some gaming experts suggested that the pipes used as obstacles in Flappy Bird, were unoriginal, and inspired from other, more popular video games, such as Super Mario Brothers, which brought about a revolution in the gaming industry.
Gameplay Overlaps
Soon after the game became a roaring success, a Vietnamese paper reported that Flappy Bird was a lot similar to another game called Piou Piou vs. Cactus, which was released two years before Flappy Bird was released. It seemed that Flappy Bird had been inspired a lot from this game. Right from the innovative gameplay, that requires players to tap the screen for keeping the bird afloat, to the design of the main character and the obstacles, everything seemed to be just the same. The developers of the game Piou Piou vs. Cactus confirmed that Dong’s Flappy Bird looked and felt astonishingly like their own game and that the similarities were just overwhelming. However, when they contacted Nguyen to talk about it, he declined to admit that it was a rip-off, and claimed that he knew nothing of the game Piou Piou vs. Cactus. Later reports claimed that the mechanics of gameplay from Flappy Bird were a complete rip-off of another game named Helicopter Game and that the sound effects and pixelated graphics were borrowed from the popular video game Super Mario Bros.
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