Are you ready to feel really old? Flappy Bird, the smartphone game which took the world by a storm in 2014, is now ten years old (and a day, actually, as it turned ten yesterday).
Developed by Vietnamese video game artist and programmer Dong Nguyen, Flappy Bird is a side-scrolling action game where the player has to guide the titular bird through a network of pipes by tapping the screen.
Initially released in May 2013, the game wouldn't go viral until the start of the following year, when it became the most downloaded free title on the iOS App Store. Nguyen claimed that he was earning as much as $50,000 a day from the adverts which ran within the game.
Nguyen famously removed the game from both the App Store and Android Google Play store on February 10th, 2014, claiming that he felt guilty over its addictive gameplay. This caused a sudden spike in people selling phones which still had the game installed on them.
"Flappy Bird was designed to play in a few minutes when you are relaxed," Nguyen would tell Forbes. "But it happened to become an addictive product. I think it has become a problem. To solve that problem, it's best to take down Flappy Bird. It's gone forever."
However, this wasn't actually the case, and the game would be released in August 2014 as Flappy Birds Family, exclusive to Amazon's Appstore for its Amazon Fire TV platform.