Today’s world is amazing, it totally is. We live in a time of opportunities and possibilities. This story is a bright example of how a free market combined with some creativity and maybe luck can make you a multi-millionaire in a matter of months. This is the astonishing story of a young Vietnamese developer who, because of suffering from the ‘too much spare time’ syndrome, decided to write a very simple game with awful graphics… Eventually, that turned out to make him incredibly rich, because of one simple reason – people just liked it! I am talking about the fabulous story of Flappy Bird and its creator Dong Nguyen, who made it. Here it is…
Dong Nguyen Was Totally Unknown Developer
Dong Nguyen was an ordinary Vietnamese guy, who lived with his parents in Hanoi. He grew up in a small village called Van Phuc, later he moved to Hanoi. There he worked a full-time job as a developer and he was living just a normal life. He had a spare weekend once, so he decided to write a mobile game. His idea was to create a really simple, but attractive app, that had to look like the old console games, which most of us enjoyed more than a decade ago. What was born that weekend was a simple side-scroller game, in which you just need to control a flying bird, by moving it up and down and preventing it from hitting the green pipes appearing in front of it. The faster you tap the screen, the higher the bird goes, that was it. The game was given the name ‘Flappy Bird’ (because it flaps when you touch the screen). Then he published the game for free on the iOS App Store on the 24th of May, 2014. Dong hoped he would be able to make a few bucks a month from the ads built into the application.
The Flappy Bird Gets Lost
After Flappy Bird was up and read on the App Store, nobody actually wanted it. As you may know, there are millions of apps there. Flappy Bird just got lost among them. It remained a totally unknown game for more than 8 months.
And one day the universe smiled at Dong…
As nobody knew about Flappy Bird for many months, something really strange happened. Surprise, surprise… Just in a matter of weeks, the popularity of the game exploded big time. The game became viral and the number of people that downloaded it increased exponentially every single day. It became one of the most installed apps in many countries around the world, everybody played it. It started spreading so rapidly, that it began bringing more than $50 000 in revenue to its young creator. Not bad for two days of work, is it? Dong Nguyen started getting rich, really rich. So, what do you think happened next?
Flappy Bird was taken down by Dong
You start making $50k per day, you win the online lottery and then you throw everything away. Wow, that’s a little crazy, but being rich and popular turned out to be not so pleasant for Dong. As he says in one of his tweets posted on the 8th of February at 9:02 PM:
‘I am sorry ‘Flappy Bird’ users, 22 hours from now, I will take ‘Flappy Bird’ down. I cannot take this anymore.’
This message was retweeted tens of thousands of times, and nobody could believe it. And because of the extinction of the game, just for those 22 hours, more than 10 million people installed the game.
What happened? When the game became so popular, many people started accusing Nguyen of stealing ideas from Nintendo. Many bloggers and gamers began publishing angry posts and comments against Flappy Bird, calling its success a theft of intellectual property. Probably all of that angry noise led to the decision for the game to be taken down. Nguyen never gave a clear reason for his decision, he must have had a good one, it’s hard to throw away an income of $50 000 per day, isn’t it?
Flappy Bird has seen a resurgence in popularity in recent years. It has been released on a variety of platforms, including iOS, Android, Windows, and Amazon. Players can also find versions of Flappy Bird with new characters and updated graphics.
Whether you’re a casual player or a hardcore fan, you’ll find something to enjoy about this classic mobile game. It’s no wonder that Flappy Bird continues to captivate people around the world after all these years.
Who Is Dong Nguyen?
Dong Nguyen grew up in a small village in Vietnam. He earned coding at home, all by himself, when he was 16. This defined his further path in life. He started studying computer science at the Vietnam National University. He started an internship in a game-developing company in ‘Hanoi, where he got some experience on the matter. This is how he got to game development. Before Flappy Bird he had some more games published, all he wanted for his applications was simplicity. Obviously, simplicity turned out to be a great power in business :).
So, take advantage of the world today and create! You can achieve everything, you just need some imagination and a little luck. That’s it, money is not important. This is the time of opportunities.
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