Flappy Bird

Flappy Bird is a short arcade game with a single control — tapping the screen makes the bird flap its wings and rise a little, otherwise gravity mercilessly pulls it back down. The goal is to fly between pipes reminiscent of Super Mario Bros without touching a single one, and it's the extremely unforgiving timing that turned what looks like a childish game into one of the hardest mobile arcade games ever made.

The game was created in 2013 by a Vietnamese developer under the name dotGears and initially went unnoticed, before becoming a viral phenomenon a year later thanks to shared scores and frustrated player reactions on social media. At the height of its popularity, when the game was earning significant money from ads, the creator himself pulled it from both the App Store and Google Play — stating that the popularity and addictive nature of the game had grown beyond what he was comfortable with and that he didn't want to build on it further. Since then, the original Flappy Bird has officially been unavailable, and the market is flooded only with countless unofficial clones and imitations trying to capture the same feeling of frustration.

Visually, it's deliberately simple pixel art reminiscent of older Nintendo games, which only heightened the contrast between the harmless look and the brutal difficulty. This very contrast — a childish appearance versus frustrating, near-impossible difficulty — became the central theme of countless internet jokes and memes that accompanied the game at the peak of its fame, even more so than the gameplay itself.

Why play it: Anyone wanting to experience a legend of mobile gaming has to accept that the original is no longer officially available and is left with clones — but historically, Flappy Bird remains an important reminder of how fast a simple idea can explode and disappear just as quickly.