![]() ![]() Three years later, while studying computer science at a university in Hanoi, he placed in the top 20 of a programming competition and got an internship with one of Hanoi’s only game companies at the time, Punch Entertainment, which made cellphone games. Marveling at the power of controlling a character onscreen, Nguyen spent his free time obsessively playing Super Mario Bros.īy 16, Nguyen had learned to code his own computer chess game. But eventually, they were able to purchase a Nintendo, which, like most electronics in Vietnam, was available only in cloned form. ![]() ![]() Though his father owned a hardware store and his mother worked for the government, his family couldn’t afford Game Boys for him or his younger brother. Growing up in Van Phuc, a village outside Hanoi famous for silk-making, Nguyen (pronounced nwin) never imagined being a world-famous game designer. “I couldn’t predict the success of Flappy Bird.” “I was just making something fun to share with other people,” he says with the help of a translator. When the country’s first celebrity geek, a boyish, slight guy in jeans and a gray sweater, walks hesitantly up and introduces himself, he measures his words and thoughts carefully, like placing pixels on a screen. Although dot-com millionaires have become familiar in the U.S., in Vietnam’s fledgling tech community they’re all but unheard of. With the international press and local paparazzi searching for him, Nguyen has been in hiding – fleeing his parents’ house to stay at a friend’s apartment, where he now remains. Two weeks after the demise of Flappy, I’m taxiing past pagodas and motorbikes to the outskirts of Hanoi, a crowded, rundown metropolis filled with street vendors selling pirated goods, to meet with Nguyen, who has agreed to share with Rolling Stone his whole story for the first time. In his wake, he left millions of jilted gamers, and one big question: Who was this dude, and WTF had he done? Nguyen, as promised, took Flappy Bird offline. How could someone who hit the online jackpot suddenly pull the plug? But when the clock struck midnight the next evening, the story came to an end. I cannot take this anymore.” The message was retweeted more than 145,000 times by the disbelieving masses. “22 hours from now, I will take ‘Flappy Bird’ down. “I am sorry ‘Flappy Bird’ users,” it read. Hanoi time, a message appeared on Nguyen’s Twitter account. The popular gaming site Kotaku wrote in a widely clicked headline, FLAPPY BIRD IS MAKING $50,000 A DAY OFF RIPPED ART. Bloggers accused him of stealing art from Nintendo. He was called a fraud, a con man and a thief. ![]() He ducked the press and refused to be photographed. Aside from the occasional tweet, he had little to say about his incredible story. Yet as Flappymania peaked, Nguyen remained a mystery. Not even Mark Zuckerberg became rich so fast. Nguyen was earning an estimated $50,000 a day. By February, it was topping the charts in more than 100 countries and had been downloaded more than 50 million times. Instead of charging for Flappy Bird, Nguyen made it available for free, and hoped to get a few hundred dollars a month from in-game ads.īut with about 25,000 new apps going online every month, Flappy Bird was lost in the mix and seemed like a bust – until, eight months later, something crazy happened. The game went live on the iOS App Store on May 24th. Game Never Over: 10 Most Addictive Video Games The quicker a player tapped the screen, the higher the bird would flap. The object was to fly a bug-eyed, big-lipped, bloated bird between a series of green vertical pipes. He wanted it to be simple but challenging, in the spirit of the Nintendo games he grew up playing. Last April, Dong Nguyen, a quiet 28-year-old who lived with his parents in Hanoi, Vietnam, and had a day job programming location devices for taxis, spent a holiday weekend making a mobile game. ![]()
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