Trivia / Flappy Bird

• Bury Your Art: On February 8, 2014, two weeks after the game picked up in popularity, Dong Nguyen announced on Twitter that "I cannot take this anymore", and removed the game from the App Store the next day. (Incidentally, this is what brought the mostly social media phenomenon mainstream media attention.) The controversy surrounded how the graphics were extremely similar but not actually the same as some game sprites from Super Mario World, and how he earned a lot of money from the ad revenue the game generated. It wasn't specifically negative towards him or the game, but he was overwhelmed and just wanted it to stop.
• Follow the Leader: Since the game was removed from the App Store, it spawned a massive number of half-assed clones trying to capitalize on the success of the original to the point that clones started to be labelled "spam" if they tried to submit to the store.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: After the game was removed from the App Store, phones on eBay that had the game still on them were going for bids as high as $90,000.^note eBay would later remove these listings, as they violated their rule stating all smartphones must be sold restored to factory settings. However, there was no such rule for non-smartphone devices. That being said, it is of trivial matter, at least for Android, to back up and restore Flappy Bird with all the save data intact, effectively making those eBay listings moot point.
  • You could alternatively try to find an arcade that still has the out-of-print arcade cabinet version of the game (made by Bay-Tek Games). Said cabinets were produced in very low supply, and as a result of that (and the Flappy Bird app steadily declining in popularity), said cabinets are getting harder and harder to find these days.
• Urban Legend of Zelda: Many people believed that when you hit pipe 900, the pipes would start moving in almost impossible-to-get-through positions, with the later pipes having piranha plants coming out of them, and if you wanted to get through the thousandth pipe, you had to defeat Mario. Most were tricked because of this video that literally shows someone watching a video of a mod called "Skip to 999". What makes it more obvious is that the person isn't actually tapping the screen.

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