Why Flappy Bird Was Pulled in 2014, and Why It Was Never Banned

Why did Flappy Bird get banned?

The short answer is that the original game was withdrawn by its maker, not banned by anyone. Nguyen's countdown was public, and he answered the obvious question the same day. "It is not anything related to legal issues." When the time ran out, Rolling Stone reported, "Nguyen, as promised, took Flappy Bird offline."

On February 11, Forbes published his first interview since the removal, conducted in Vietnamese in a Hanoi hotel. His reason was the game itself. "Flappy Bird was designed to play in a few minutes when you are relaxed," he said. "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."

So the accurate verb is removed, or withdrawn. The rumors that grew around the removal pointed at a ban from outside, and each one can be checked against what the people involved said at the time.

How a weekend game became a sensation

Rolling Stone's March 2014 profile places the game's creation on a holiday weekend in April 2013, while Hanoi celebrated Reunification Day. Nguyen, then 28, had a day job programming location devices for taxis. He modeled the game on paddleball, the wooden paddle with a ball on a string, and kept it to two elements, a bird and green pipes he drew as a homage to Super Mario Bros.

It launched in May 2013 and went nowhere for months. Rolling Stone found the first mention on Twitter came on November 4, then the game climbed, to the Top 10 of the US charts by early January and Number One on January 17, 2014. By early February The Verge counted 50 million downloads and over 47,000 App Store reviews.

The money followed the downloads. After interviewing Nguyen, The Verge reported the game was "earning on average $50,000 per day from in-app ads." Six days later, asked by Forbes about that figure, he answered, "I don't know the exact figure, but I do know it's a lot." Either way, it was a free game whose income came from the ads shown between attempts, a model he told The Verge "is very common in the Japanese market." The other common model, purchases inside the game, has a guide of its own here, on how to turn off in-app purchases.

A game tuned to punish

The difficulty that made people furious was deliberate. Nguyen "tuned the physics so that the bird was fighting gravity so strong, even the slightest wrong tap would kill it," Rolling Stone wrote, and since deaths would be constant, he worked on making them funny, settling on a faceplant and a kung-fu thwack.

That choice runs opposite to an earlier one-button game. Canabalt, the 2009 rooftop runner, was tuned to forgive. Its designer has described hitboxes set behind the runner and roofs that reach past their visible edge, so a late jump still lands. Two games with one input each, built on opposite answers to the same question. Should the game catch you, or let you fall?

Flappy Bird let you fall, constantly, and that is what people shared. Rolling Stone counted more than 16 million Twitter messages about it.

The week it came down

The fame landed on one person who did not want it. Vietnamese papers and TV ran his face, which is how his parents learned he had made the game. Before the countdown, he tweeted, "I can call 'Flappy Bird' is a success of mine. But it also ruins my simple life. So now I hate it."

Rolling Stone describes what else he was reading, which was messages from players and parents. One accused him of "distracting the children of the world." Another said "13 kids at my school broke their phones because of your game, and they still play it cause it's addicting like crack." He told Forbes that guilt motivated him, and "I couldn't sleep."

The countdown itself became an event. After the tweet, Rolling Stone reported, "10 million people downloaded it in 22 hours." Then the game was gone from both stores, and phones that still had it installed were listed on eBay for thousands of dollars.

The rumors, checked

Each rumor can be set against what the people involved said at the time.

• Did Nintendo sue over the pipes? Reuters, as quoted by Tuoi Tre News, cited two friends saying Nintendo sent a warning letter, and Nintendo said it was not considering a lawsuit.
• Did a legal problem force it down? Nguyen's tweet, as quoted by Tuoi Tre News, said "It is not anything related to legal issues."
• Did Apple or Google take it down? No. Nguyen announced the removal 22 hours ahead and kept to it, as Rolling Stone and USA Today reported.
• Did the government make him do it? Forbes reported its interview was delayed several hours, in part by a sudden meeting with Vietnam's deputy prime minister, Vu Duc Dam, which came after the game was already gone.
• Was it a marketing stunt? He told Forbes it was guilt and lost sleep, and a month later, Rolling Stone found, he was still turning down offers to buy the game.

Tuoi Tre News, the English edition of a Vietnamese daily, also reported local speculation about copyright risk and taxes. Speculation is all it was, and none of the people involved said either one caused the removal.

What did get banned was the word Flappy

Removing the game did not remove the demand. Rolling Stone found the top three free iPhone apps were Flappy rip-offs by the time of its visit, and cited a study counting a new clone "every 24 minutes."

The stores pushed back on the name. TechCrunch reported on February 15, 2014, that Apple rejected a game called Flappy Dragon and told its developer, Ken Carpenter, "we found your app name attempts to leverage a popular app." Apple cited its App Store Review Guideline 22.2, against "false, fraudulent or misleading representations." TechCrunch's headline named Google too. Carpenter told it, "Yeah, I was rejected from Google Play, too," and said the suspension notice he got later "referenced the 'spam' provision of the Google Play terms." A February 19 update added that these "were not blanket rejections across the board."

That is the closest thing to a ban in the whole story, a block on games trading on Flappy Bird's name, after the original had already left.

The versions that came after

Nguyen did not close the door entirely. He told Rolling Stone that any new version would come with a warning, "Please take a break." In May 2014 he told CNBC the game would return in August, with multiplayer, and be less addictive.

It came back in a form few phones could run. IGN reported on August 1, 2014, that Flappy Birds Family had been released "only on the Fire TV platform," through Amazon's Appstore, with a person-versus-person mode.

Three versions carry the name.

• Flappy Bird, by Dong Nguyen's studio .Gears, was on the App Store and Google Play from May 2013 to February 2014.
• Flappy Birds Family, also by Dong Nguyen (.Gears), came out in August 2014 on Amazon Fire TV only.
• Flappy Bird (2024), announced in September 2024, is the Flappy Bird Foundation's own release, not Nguyen's.

The 2024 game is a different story. PC Gamer reported that the foundation acquired the Flappy Bird trademark from Gametech Holdings, after Nguyen's own 2014 trademark application was opposed and eventually treated as abandoned. Nguyen answered on social media, as GamesRadar reported, that he "did not sell anything," and "I also don't support crypto."

What the bird left behind

The original Flappy Bird was in the stores from May 2013 to February 2014, and its most famous stretch was the 22 hours before it left. Nobody banned it. Its creator decided a game built to be played for a few minutes had become something else, and took it down himself while the money was still coming in.