Flappy Bird Creator Dong Nguyen Speaks Out

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-flight-of-the-birdman-flappy-bird-creator-dong-nguyen-speaks-out-20140311

by johns • 12 years ago

570 228 12 years ago

uptown• 12 years ago

"Then he hit a button, and Flappy Bird disappeared. When I ask him why he did it, he answers with the same conviction that led him to create the game. 'I'm master of my own fate,' he says. 'Independent thinker.'"

Good for him. The world needs more people with this attitude.

adriand• 12 years ago

I agree. I love this guy. I bet that very few of us on HN would have done what he did. I certainly wouldn't have.

I'm not saying that what he did was right, but it was right for him, and what is impressive to me is that he realized that. That kind of self-knowledge is a wonderful quality to have or develop.

cobrausn• 12 years ago

Yes, it is difficult to bring oneself to turn off the magic money machine once it starts printing, but keep in mind how much money he made and how much the existing installed copies still make for him. It certainly made the decision easier, I think.

trevoragilbert• 12 years ago

I think to myself that I definitely wouldn't have, and that I would have weather the storm of the press outside my house, and just focused on that great payday (everyday).

But from what I've heard, the paparazzi changes everything and it really is life-changing. So hard to say either way.

baddox• 12 years ago

I guess I don't quite understand. I also believe that I am to some extent "master of my fate," but I would use my authority to choose to leave the game up and keep earning money. I would do so with as much pride and conviction as Dong Nguyen.

herbig• 12 years ago

Turning it off has probably done more to earn him money than keeping it on. It also ends with him saying it's possibly he'd put the game back up.

It's possible this is instead just a brilliant marketing ploy.

legohead2• 12 years ago

Or he spent money on buying votes for his game and rather than deal with a ToS breach and lose his money, he took it off the market.

mark212• 12 years ago

I'm not so sure. It would have to use iAd on iOS to do display ads, and Apple would yank that access with a breach of the terms of service. I doubt he's still getting "tens of thousands" of dollars from ad revenue in Android alone.

neolefty• 12 years ago

Please stop repeating rumors with no evidence.

mpermar3• 12 years ago

He could also have scheduled a recurrent funds transfer to the charity of his choice. That would have been a lot of karma for the future.

GuiA• 12 years ago

"But the hardest thing of all, he says, was something else entirely. He hands me his iPhone so that I can scroll through some messages he's saved. One is from a woman chastising him for "distracting the children of the world." Another laments that "13 kids at my school broke their phones because of your game, and they still play it cause it's addicting like crack." Nguyen tells me of e-mails from workers who had lost their jobs, a mother who had stopped talking to her kids. "At first I thought they were just joking," he says, "but I realize they really hurt themselves." Nguyen – who says he botched tests in high school because he was playing too much Counter-Strike – genuinely took them to heart."

grecy2• 12 years ago

He said he was overwhelmed with guilt from all the people who's lives were going down the drain because of his game.

Simply taking all that money and giving it away doesn't change that. The end does not justify the means.

sdegutis• 12 years ago

Disagreed.

codecondo• 12 years ago

The featured photo for this story is very strong, and it answers more questions than the story itself ever will :)

pfisch• 12 years ago

I heard it was just a reskin of a premade game he got off an asset store. Is that not the case?

This article made it sound like it was an original idea, but I thought it was just that one button to go up, no button to go down flash game. Is that not what it is?

wlesieutre• 12 years ago

Slight variation (which may have been done before) where you tap instead of holding. Your upward bounce has a predetermined strength that makes minor course corrections impossible. It's definitely an added challenge.

Re: Asset store reskin, I have no idea. But FWIW I hadn't heard that accusation before.

pervycreeper• 12 years ago

What asset store would that be?

The article explains how the game was designed.

abruzzi• 12 years ago

The basic gameplay has been around for a long time. My old palm pilot had a similar game called "cave". The a article however talks about him designing the graphics, sound, physics, etc.

rasz_pl• 12 years ago

He designed Mario pipes? WOW!

Geee• 12 years ago

It's original. There weren't any games that work exactly like it.

interstitial• 12 years ago

Except for the one with a fat yellow bird with tiny wings, with the same game mechanic of a 2D scroller, flapping through holes defined by green cactus instead of Mario World tunnels, it's original.

lotsofmangos• 12 years ago

mason240• 12 years ago

There are very few original ideas out there.

dottrap• 12 years ago

No. Here's a video that gives a lot of video game historical context. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us-W5CWj7Ic

nols• 12 years ago

No, I believe you're thinking of the current knock-offs that are top apps. Those are created from source code found on Chupamobile.

elwell2• 12 years ago

  three he's working on simultaneously: an untitled cowboy-themed shooter, a vertical flying game called Kitty Jetpack and an "action chess game," as he puts it, called Checkonaut, one of which he'll release this month

Don't say the names of his to-be-released games; someone might grab the app names now. (Unless they're already approved but hidden; though Apple usually doesn't allow "in-progress"/beta app submissions)

vezzy-fnord• 12 years ago

They're likely preliminary titles anyway.

fnayr• 12 years ago

He can save the names for 180 days (plus more) for iOS. But it's still not smart because hundreds of games with similar titles might start launching before his.

diminoten• 12 years ago

Something tells me he doesn't give a hoot.

level• 12 years ago

Sounds a little like Jetpack Kitty.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jetpack-kitty/id567551748?mt...

iLoch• 12 years ago

I imagine it being more like Papi/Doodle Jump, but with constant upwards velocity, and perhaps some instability in moving left and right to dodge objects.

elwell2• 12 years ago

I'm reminded of a time in elementary school when I opened a Pokémon booster pack to discover a Charizard. I thought it was the best day of my life, but all my friends wanted to trade me for it, and I began to hate my Charizard card. I even had a nightmare in which Charizard blew fire at me. Alas, fame and fortune are quite the deception.

netcan• 12 years ago

That is possibly one of the geekiest analogies I have ever heard. Fly that flag!

da_maire• 12 years ago

I had a Charizard card, but I bought it from a local hobby store for some insane price with birthday money. I don't remember how old I was, elementary school I think, all the adults in my life told me it was a terrible decision but I had poor impulse control, wasn't one to listen to anyone, and my parents tended to let me learn my own lessons, so I ended up buying the card anyway. Ultimately all the card collectors at school worshipped me for having a Charizard, it was totally worth it and the lesson I took from it all ended up being 'don't listen to your parents' combined with 'money will buy you happiness' or something along those lines.

_cbb1• 12 years ago

I am millenial like yourself. I got the praise and worship from my other classmates for owning a charzard the difference from my story and yours is that I opened up the booster pack and found one. I ended up listening to my parents, saved the $75 dollars, and was ultimately happy.

Until some kid actually stole my binder and I lost it all.

The moral of my story is "don't trust anyone"

danso• 12 years ago

Ah dangit, another famous Nguyen (along with Dat Nguyen) who I'll be asked if I'm related to. It's especially interesting and cool that he's still in Vietnam, and I'm not surprised that was a heavy factor in just waking away...$50,000 a day, even a year, is a lot of money. My uncle was making less than that (a year) in Saigon and yet could still afford to rent a massive house with courtyard, 2 servants and a nanny, and a SUV with a driver.

(BTW, dong is the name of Vietnam's currency, something that is probably worth a lot of jokes in the Vietnamese media)

Also, becoming a viral success (regardless of quality of the game) from Vietnam is a much different and rarer accomplishment than doing it from America (or any place where the world's media is more attuned to). Kudos to him!

MarkTee2• 12 years ago

Ha, when I was a kid there was a criminal in my city named Nguyen Thanh (I think he might have been on the run or wanted for a warrant or something). One day I was playing an online game and saw somebody who had "nguyenthanh" as their username. I freaked out and ran to my dad, excited to tell him that I'd cracked the case. Much to my dismay he explained to me that those were 2 of the most common names in Vietnam.

imjk• 12 years ago

"Nguyen wanted to make games for people like himself: busy, harried, always on the move. "I pictured how people play," he says, as he taps his iPhone and reaches his other hand in the air. "One hand holding the train strap." He'd make a game for them."

I found myself playing in this exact manner many times while riding the subway. Even when I would go just one or two stops, it was convenient way to spend the time squeezing in a few games of Flappy Bird without worrying about concentrating too hard on any one game, or being concerned about getting cutoff in any one round by having to leave or dodge a bystander.

Ryel3• 12 years ago

Just to clarify, Dong Nguyen is still alive... right?

The article is a little fuzzy -

"In the wake of Flappy Bird's demise, rumors spread. Nguyen had committed suicide."

sixQuarks• 12 years ago

Didn't you read the article? He committed Japanese ritual suicide, in front of 100 broken iphones sent to him by irate players.

wpietri3• 12 years ago

Did you miss that this was an interview?

Ryel3• 12 years ago

I only know he is still alive because I've followed the Flappy Bird story.

I just shared this story with 3 people who only know OF him, all 3 of them replied with their condolences and then we found consolation in his humor about CounterStrike. As a reporter I would think there should be some importance in leaving zero room for misintepretation regarding somebody's well-being.

Is that wrong?

sukuriant• 12 years ago

That part had strange wording. I'm assuming that that was one of the rumors. It could have been worded better, perhaps with a colon and then a list of rumors.

bsenftner• 12 years ago

As a long term developer of entertainment software, I totally agree with his point of view about the impact one's software has upon the lives of the user. The general acceptance goes that the crazies and depressed will be triggered by something and its not your fault if something provocative you worked on triggers an incident. That's what the group think tells us, but in ones personal reality it's not that easy to shrug off. Over the decades I've been on the teams of high profile games and films with medium levels of violence. After each title is released, I'd receive a half dozen or so "fan" emails from people who obviously researched the dev team and was reaching out. On the games with medium levels of violence, of the half dozen fan emails only one would be praise, the others would be serious hate mail. That kind of stuff throws you, even if you suspect pretty strongly that the sender is probably 8 years old. Yeah, I can totally see why he pulled the plug. He's got enough momey, and he's not greedy. What he want's most is clearly freedom, and fame was taking that away. Yeah, I'd pull the plug too.

conesus• 12 years ago

To be fair, I run a news reader and you wouldn't believe some of the hate mail I receive. I just assumed he received much more of it and not enough of the positive mail.

Also, when you're at the business end of a press blitz, you get overwhelmed and can make irrational decisions that you might come to regret.

robflynn4• 12 years ago

It was the same for me when I was project lead for Gaim/Pidgin. I was lead for something like 6 years and I eventually got tired of the hate.

Sure, there was plenty of praise, too. But the harassment eventually became annoying. It hit it's breaking point when someone folks managed to figure out my cell phone number and would call me at all sorts of hours (3am once!) to "tell me about their ideas."

I changed my cell number but it eventually happened again.

Most of my interactions with users were positive, though. But, the various legal issues, hateful folks, and my day job suddenly taking more time I decided to give it up and pass it on to someone else. I had already become mostly observational/maintenance on the project in my last year there anyways.

Slight digressions aside, I was fairly young when I got with the project and it was surprisingly to me how angry some people could be for no reason at all.

hnriot• 12 years ago

I totally disagree with his point of view. He could simply sell the game to an established company that is already set up to handle the responsibilities that come with running a business. Throwing away $50k/day is just a stupid thing to do.

TsomArp• 12 years ago

agreed.

dasil0033• 12 years ago

So what if it's stupid? We know how much damage greed does to the world. The world would be a better place if more people stood up for principles over money.

_blz2• 12 years ago

Some people believe lot of money changes you and people's perception of you. He seemed to be one of them and it doesn't sound stupid.

Blahah• 12 years ago

Others might say chasing $50k/day is a stupid thing to do. With enough money to live off, plenty of people seek happiness elsewhere.

xg152• 12 years ago

As he wrote, he didn't put the game down because he was afraid of the money or didn't want to run a business, he was actually afraid of the effect the "addictiveness" of the game had on some of its users.

With that premise, selling to an established company would have been the most irresponsible thing he could do. After all, the biggest assets of the game are its large user base, the media hype and just that "addictiveness". So this would probably be the first thing any buyer would have exploited, making Dong's problem worse instead of better.

Iftheshoefits• 12 years ago

Depending upon one's starting debt load, any person of average intelligence or better would be able to, after a few days to a couple of weeks of that income, "retire" to a lower stress job, or even have the freedom to work for oneself in a less public arena.

In the US, $350,000 (1 week @$50k/day average) works out to somewhere north of $200,000 after taxes. That's a lot of money, even if it's not life changing for somebody in the tech industry with a typical salaried job in the Bay Area.

ecdavis• 12 years ago

Maybe for some. He probably has enough in the bank to live comfortably in Vietnam for the rest of his life, though.

smtddr• 12 years ago

>Throwing away $50k/day is just a stupid thing to do.

I would have done the same thing if I was in his shoes; just get out of the spotlight with whatever money I already made(and still making from previous-installs). Getting paid 50k, even just once, for a mobile game I wrote over a weekend is more than enough. I wouldn't care how many millions I left at the table by dropping it and running away.

I'd just upload it to github, throw on WTFPL[1], and run away never to be seen again.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL

biot• 12 years ago

Two things about that:

  1. He's still earning ad revenue from existing installs.
  2. In the last 22 hours of the app's existence (when he announced
     he would be taking it down) more than 10 million new people
     installed it.

In other words, he's likely making just as much if not more today. He could have instantly removed it from the app store instead of saying "in 22 hours", so it's entirely possible that he's way better off due to all the publicity and attention from the app's removal.

aestra4• 12 years ago

The average wage in Vietnam is $2,200 a year.[1] He made over 22 times the average yearly wage in a day. The average wage in the US is $50,233.[2] 22 times that is $1,105,126.

If you did that for a month, that would be the Vietnam purchasing equivalent of maybe about $33,000,000. He still has income coming in from the game, it hasn't stopped. He has enough money to retire and live a nice life in Vietnam.

For many people (myself included) enough is enough! He made enough and now he wants to get back to his quiet simple life. That is what he values, not an endless quest for more money. He felt the game was destroying his life. I don't blame him, I wouldn't want that kind of attention either.

Some people can just be happy with what they have.

[1]http://www.thanhniennews.com/business/vietnam-average-monthl...

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...

mitosis• 12 years ago

He did not throw away $50k/day. He walked away from it because he had enough money already and did not need any more of it (especially since he did not particularly enjoy all the attention that came with the money, but even if he did not mind it, that would not change my point).

stcredzero6• 12 years ago

That's what the group think tells us, but in ones personal reality it's not that easy to shrug off.

The Internet not only has increased the range of hateful groupthink, it has made a large number of people believe that it is somehow noble and elevated. It almost seems like there's an anti-intelligentsia of forum manipulators who see the creation of new and pointless forms of prejudice as a kind of sport.

I have the growing impression that there's a growing segment of people online who see their outrage and any acts motivated by it as the expression of some kind of enlightened vigilante justice. It just so happens that the worst crimes against humanity were motivated by people who thought just like that. Unfortunately, it's the single best way to blind yourself against your own evil deeds while making it likely you'll get trapped into irrevocable courses of action.

specialist• 12 years ago

made a large number of people believe that it is somehow noble and elevated.

People haven't changed. There have always been trolls, malcontents, crazies. Attend any public hearing, ask any fan club or newspaper mail room.

As a new medium, the distinction of the web is significantly lowered transaction costs. No different from email spammers.

hsod• 12 years ago

Can you give some examples of "new and pointless forms of prejudice"?

antirez2• 12 years ago

To be fair, seen from outside, this seems something strange and, in my opinion, not good about the American culture: there is always somebody to blame for your problem, a reason why you are acting in a given way, an external cause if you suffer a medical problem, eat too much, put all the kind of pills in your body, and so forth.

Probably this is representative only of a minority, but from the outside this looks like a vocal minority, and even a very small minority, if can feel offended, or addicted, or something else because of your work, can easily turn your work into a nightmare.

Now the thing is: it is not true. You, with your work, are not forcing anyone. We live in a world full of possibilities, the problem here is, to be able to critically analyze what you do, otherwise there is no thing that can save you, you'll misuse even the simpler things to cause yourself some kind of problems.

There is more, even controversial things have some very good impact on the life of people making judicious use of those things. Example: a violent game can be a way to express violence of an otherwise repressed person, or some other people that is having a few bad weeks, is finding an escape playing at it. Similarly alcool, that if abused can be bad, addicting, and destroy people, is the joy of many people having a glass of wine from time to time, and so forth.

Most of the times the problem is not the tool but the user.

jusben1369• 12 years ago

Why do you think this is a US specific issue?

minikites• 12 years ago

Example: a violent game can be a way to express violence of an otherwise repressed person, or some other people that is having a few bad weeks, is finding an escape playing at it.

Yeah, that's not actually true. "Letting your anger out" makes you angrier.

http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/08/11/catharsis/

stank345• 12 years ago

I would say the problem is people blaming the proximate but not the absolute causes. In a lot of cases, society sets people up to fail and then blames them when they do. In your overeating example, the problem is that we have tons of highly available, cheap, unhealthy food being marketed to you 24/7. The proximate cause of your obesity might be that you eat too much, but the absolute one is a combination of capitalism, technology, and human physiology.

JabavuAdams2• 12 years ago

You make some good points, but games are a special case. Making something fun is not really that different from making it addictive. There's a huge grey area and lots of room for cognitive dissonance / rationalization among game creators. We've learned a lot about addiction, and people are not nearly as rational as they want to believe.

My thinking is that many of the people who are really passionate about making games have somewhat addictive personalities. I.e. there are some people who would just never stay up 'till 3 am playing a game when there's something more "important" to do, whereas game creators have turned this flaw into a virtue (and a career).

EDIT> I love games, and I have a great job making games, but I'm 38 and I now realize that I spent way too much time playing games in my 20's. While it is a matter of self-control, I do have some guilt that some kid is going to fail their Compilers exam because they'd rather play computer games instead of studying, like me circa 1995.

joesmo• 12 years ago

The "blame game." It's so ingrained in US culture that many people don't know how to operate otherwise. It's not exclusive to the US, but it's certainly a defining factor of society here.

bennyg2• 12 years ago

I created a fairly successful app that aimed to give users the best drink specials in my college town. I honestly can't bring myself to work on it anymore because I feel morally reprehensible and somewhat socially responsible for binge drinking when alcohol is such a dangerous substance. Who's not going to over-drink when well drinks are $0.25 a pop, nobody makes a ton of expendable income in college, and my app prominently puts that special in front of 3000 sets of eyeballs? I just don't feel like I'm adding goodness to the world - I feel like I'm subtracting it.

NamTaf2• 12 years ago

For what it's worth, Australia's been a pretty good case study on how significantly increased (+70%) taxes - and therefore, prices - for alcohol did not deter binge drinking [1]. All it did was shift the consumption from one form to another, as well as decrease drinking between binges. In that sense, you could arguably say that you're not materially increasing the prevalence of binge drinking but really just saving the money of those who are inevitably going to do it.

Then again, binge drinking here is baked in to the cultural psyche. It may still be seen as more dangerous and therefore less socially acceptable in the States.

[1] http://www.uq.edu.au/news/article/2013/06/alcopops-tax-fails...

brador• 12 years ago

No mention of the massive publicity boost from the Youtube let's play video of Flappy Bird by that strange Norwegian guy with millions of subscribers?

ChrisClark• 12 years ago

Which was a really big help, but by the time it was on that Youtube channel it was already #1 on the App Store. It really was word of mouth that got it there. There are whole articles analyzing the Flappy Bird rise. I didn't bookmark any though, but they all seemed to conclude it was the perfect storm of viral awareness, it just spread by word of mouth perfectly.

vetler• 12 years ago

Who's this strange Norwegian guy?

MarkTee2• 12 years ago

I believe he's talking about PewDiePie, who's actually Swedish.

aestra4• 12 years ago

It was mentioned.

"As word spread from Reddit to YouTube, playgrounds to office parks, Flappy Bird rose to the Top 10 of the U.S. charts by early January."

applecore• 12 years ago

Unfortunately, by removing Flappy Bird from the App Store, he opened the door for shitty clones to reach the top of the charts. This arguably made the lives of users worse. He also passed up the opportunity to make millions of more dollars in merchandising.

jaxytee• 12 years ago

Shitty clones would've been made irregardless of him removing the app from the store.

dTal• 12 years ago

Flappy Bird is itself a shitty clone - an imperfect copy of it runs even odds of being a better game.

_alastair• 12 years ago

At least it's given the world a new alternative to 'a to-do list' in demonstrating new technologies/languages/etc. There are ones for various different gaming frameworks:

https://github.com/uralozden/flappy-bird

https://github.com/ellisonleao/clumsy-bird

The ZX-81: http://bobs-stuff.co.uk/quack.html

and so on. To my shame, I made a version that you play by flapping your arms:

http://experimenting.alastair.is/flappyarms

drawkbox• 12 years ago

Flappy Arms, nice one, might be fun on Kinect as well. Flappy Bird has become an experimentational platform of its own.

wetmore• 12 years ago

Oh cool, I made something similar at PennApps this year. I made a Chrome extension that let you play a bunch of flappy bird clones by flapping your arms on webcam.

tled• 12 years ago

Talking about shitty clones, many have been pulled down by Google:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.airhoc.fla...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ante.nyanc...

kerkeslager• 12 years ago

He also passed up the opportunity to make millions of more dollars in merchandising.

If you had enough money, would you realize it?

In the US, one study found that income is positively correlated to happiness only up to $75,000/year. If the $50K/day claims are true, in the 41 days between January 1 and February 10, he made enough money to live at $75,000/year for the next 27 years, without investment of any kind.

It's reasonable to guess that he will invest the money, and that the money/happiness plateau is significantly lower in Vietnam than in the US due to a lower cost of living. So he could be living at the happiness plateau for the rest of his life.

So why exactly should he care that he's passed up millions of dollars in selling stuff nobody needs? Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell.

[1] http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727770.101-money-can...

thenonsequitur• 12 years ago

This part of the interview seems relevant here:

"People can clone the app because of its simplicity," Nguyen says, "but they will never make another Flappy Bird."

mesuvash• 12 years ago

Nothing but #respect. It's hard to see people who give up fortune for what they consider right thing(atleast from his perspective).

bglazer• 12 years ago

I think he's still making money from the in-game ads in already downloaded copies of Flappy Bird. Still cool. "Independent thinker". I like it.

asharpe• 12 years ago

yes, especially as he doesn't want to sell it and let someone else deal with the crap. Shame that people want to cut down others who are successful

United8572• 12 years ago

Another plausible reason that I've not seen reported is that if he was indeed pulling in $50k/day, that makes you a target in Vietnam (average monthly salary $185).

In that part of the world, being rich without having the right connections/protection can be very, very dangerous.

ronaldx• 12 years ago

Do you have a source for this?

I've only heard this said on HN and I doubt that it is significantly dangerous to be rich.

United8572• 12 years ago

I've lived/worked/travelled in Asia for several years and still regularly visit family and friends.

Sadly Vietnam (and China, etc) don't really adhere to the rule of law except on paper, bribes and corruption are normal and it's really about the connections you have.

You really have to live there to appreciate that -- not just on a holiday for a week.

yeukhon• 12 years ago

It's hard to get any source that would satisfy your question.

Let me put it this way. You are poor. Your family is poor. Everyone around you is poor. When you are financially in trouble, you ask someone to lend you money. In Asian culture, you don't start asking bank for money. You ask your friends, relatives and neighbors for help.

Now you are famous. Making $50,000 a day. Everyone is going to come after you and ask for help. You don't want to because who wants to be debt collector? But you have to because they are your relatives, friends and neighbors. You are in a dilemma and you don't know what to do about it.

Also, regardless of where you live, when you are rich you and your family becomes kidnappers' target. In countries like Vietnam making $50,000 a day makes you a millionaire to the people who are just making a few dollars a day...

He was happy with the initial revenue but he then realize his publicity would have cost him relationship with other people and that's what money can't undo for him. He just can't.

vinceguidry• 12 years ago

It's not that bad. Vietnam isn't prison.

theorique• 12 years ago

The scale of wealth is so different, wouldn't he be able to purchase protection?

Granted, it would involve a radical lifestyle transformation that might be unpleasant and jarring, but it seems like he already got exposed to that by getting internet famous. Might as well enjoy the money.

jonny_eh• 12 years ago

You can't transform your lifestyle like that overnight, especially if you value your current one, which it sounds like he did.

watwut3• 12 years ago

Would he be able to pay that in long term? And if not, what happens when he runs out of money? Relationships and livestyle he has now would be gone forever and he would not be able to pay new one.

Plus, he would be lucky if people protecting him would simply left. Those are probably people you do not want to mess with at all. It is entirely possible they would get dangerous and demanding.

cycojesus• 12 years ago

Given the number of Bentley, Lamborghini, Ferrari, and cars in general roaming the streets of Hanoi I'm not sure that's a valid point.

akfanta• 12 years ago

I am so tired of this kind of ignorant bullshit. Do you folks still think countries like Vietnam are still like what they were thirty years ago? Like it or not, that part of the world has changed a lot.

icanhasfay• 12 years ago

Just something itching me wrong about purposefully making a game excruciatingly difficult and then getting so emotionally affected by their reactions to that difficultly that you are distraught.

mindstab• 12 years ago

he was affected by their addiction and its affects on their lives, which the difficultly played a part in the cycle of.

stevejohnson2• 12 years ago

Does anyone have the source for the Romero quote on the third page?

    John Romero, co-creator of the game Doom, says Flappy Bird
    is "a reaction against prevailing design the way grunge 
    was a reaction to metal."

pgrote• 12 years ago

Odd. I cannot find a source for it on Google, twitter, his personal site or facebook.

stevenwei• 12 years ago

Perhaps the source is the article itself (i.e. he was contacted by the author)?

beachstartup• 12 years ago

john romero is the source. the reporter called him, and got a quote.

i can't believe i'm explaining this to someone right now.

i386• 12 years ago

Its called journalism.

stevejohnson2• 12 years ago

To the snarky replies in this comment subtree: that passage read as if it was referring to some other piece or statement by Romero, which I'd be interested in reading further if it existed. The comparison is apt.

Intuitively, this doesn't seem like a good way to quote someone you called up specifically for this article.

rottyguy• 12 years ago

"Growing up in Van Phuc, a village outside Hanoi famous for silk-making, Nguyen (pronounced nwin) never imagined being a world-famous game designer."

As Nguyen is a very popular Vietnamese name, I'd thought to bring this up.. It is not pronounced with an 'N'.. wikipedia has the correct pronunciation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nguyen

zhemao2• 12 years ago

The "southern pronunciation" on that Wikipedia page clearly has an N sound at the beginning.

DanBC• 12 years ago

Is there a cultural bias in the HN comments?

Some of the asian social networks are ferocious, much worse than the twitter witch hunts we sometimes see in the US.

The Human flesh search engine doesn't sound like something I'd want to be on the wrong end of.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_flesh_search_engine

Destitute• 12 years ago

Does anyone know what language he coded the game in? It's kind of a feat in itself that he ported it (by himself) to Android rather quickly. Is he using some sort of wrapper?

megablast• 12 years ago

It is not a complicated game. Would not have been to hard to do it natively.

thret• 12 years ago

"I pictured how people play," he says, as he taps his iPhone and reaches his other hand in the air. "One hand holding the train strap."

That's the main insight.

DigitalSea• 12 years ago

I wish the game industry as a whole was a lot more like Dong, instead of being all about the money. He gave up 50k a day, no doubt if the app had stayed in the store it might have even climbed higher before peaking and slowly coming back down. That one line in the interview when asked why he took his game down, "I'm master of my own fate" says it all about the type of guy Dong is: a decent one.

Sure he's still making money from the people that downloaded it, but he's not being greedy and I respect that. He put the well-being and privacy of himself and his family above the crazy amounts of money he was making. He made his money and he is grateful, he didn't try and push it as far as he could have. Heck, he had so many offers from people wanting to buy the game, he could have easily commanded a six-figure sum for the IP alone, but didn't. He just decided to take it down and leave it at that.

The world needs more people like Dong.

blazespin• 12 years ago

I think rolling stone is having a tuff time differentiating between a meme and a world famous video game.

mrb• 12 years ago

"Nguyen was earning an estimated $50,000 a day. Not even Mark Zuckerberg became rich so fast."

False. Zuckerberg became rich faster. Facebook was founded in February 2004. As of February 2014 Zuckerberg's personal wealth is estimated at $31.6 billion. So, during these 10 years, his wealth increased on average by $8.7 million per day.

But I guess the point is moot anyway since RollingStone is comparing apples to oranges (earning != wealth).

unreal373• 12 years ago

He went from $0 in the bank to $1,000,000 in the bank in the span of a few weeks. That's pretty fast by any standard. Starting from 0.

HNaTTY• 12 years ago

This was an interesting writeup, but I can't help but think that removing Flappy Bird at the height of popularity was anything less than the shrewdest of PR moves. He continues to get all the ad dollars from existing installs, and has achieved legendary status, assuring that any new games he may release get a lot of coverage and positioning him at the top of the heap. It's really genius!

judk5• 12 years ago

Dong Nguyen is doing an awesome pivot from a throwaway fad app into a celebrity.

argumentum• 12 years ago

the young programmer stood out for his speed, skills and fierce independent streak. "Dong didn't need a supervisor," Truong says. "He wasn't comfortable with it. So we said he did not have to report to anyone.

Years ago, when I heard of someone being spectacularly successful at something I "could have done" should I have chosen to I chalked it up to luck & circumstance. Two prominent examples come to mind: Facebook and Groupon.

Funny thing is, every time I actually looked into the story behind such phenomena (or met the individuals involved), I would find there's always more than meets the eye.

There's some obsession, some genius (often bordering on insanity), some talent or character trait or propensity behind what seems to be just "luck".

Safe to say, I no longer believe in luck. Of course, there's randomness, which sometimes favors you and other times acts against your interests. But what people call "luck" is what you make of this randomness.

I don't know Dong Nguyen. I've never met him or talked to him. I don't know what makes him tick, or tap or flap. I have little to say about why he pulled his app, except that it likely had nothing to do with money or fame or success.

I can say, however, that there's likely more than meets the eye.

userbinator• 12 years ago

I don't know what makes him tick, or tap or flap.

Great way of saying it.

AnitoKid• 12 years ago

Awesome article! And I kid you not!

kimonos• 12 years ago

I totally understand his point. Good luck to him.

JacobAldridge• 12 years ago

Single page http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-flight-of-the-b...

SilverSurfer972• 12 years ago

So what will happen if his next game hit the top ten again? Shut it down? Why not put his game for charity or just stop releasing games if he really care about how his game affects the players?

Fuxy• 12 years ago

Great to hear he's doing OK.

There's just one recommendation i can give him develop a thicker skin you can't change your game for every person blaming external things for their own incompetence.

My office is net to the call center if you ever hear the stupid shit people say you will realize you can't take anything to heart.

Do your thing man and ignore people complaining that their life was ruined by you in some way they will blame everybody except themselves.

felipelalli• 12 years ago

TL;DR "13 kids at my school broke their phones because of your game, and they still play it cause it's addicting like crack."

josefresco• 12 years ago

Did anyone else find it odd that he's working on new games, that will (if successful) potentially have the same negative impact on the lives of the people who play and Nguyen himself?

I don't think Nguyen needs a reason to pull the app, and I respect his right to change his mind but I find it funny that we all seek some sort of wisdom when in fact there might not be any. Shit got crazy and he pulled the game, the end. Doesn't make for a compelling story, and creates no "guiding mantra" for other game developers, but for me it's just as meaningful.

jacquesm• 12 years ago

We had a guy commit suicide on cam in the early days of our website. It was terrible. I was asleep in NL, nobody thought of calling us, just an email that went unseen for the better part of the night. Then in the morning I woke up to a site that was pulled off the air by the hosting provider (ev1) to lessen the chances of copycat acts or other mishaps.

Looking back through the chat snippets that people had mailed from that cam it looked like a bunch of assholes had actively pushed the guy to do it.

We figured out where he lived and sent the police to his home, they took the guy down and after that ev1 restored service to our machine but for the longest time I felt like simply leaving it off.

It's no fun at all when your creations get away from you in ways that you did not foresee. There is a lot more backstory to this which I'm not going to relate here for obvious reasons, and that wasn't even the lowest point of running a consumer oriented website for 15 years and counting, go figure.

Flappy Bird Creator Dong Nguyen Speaks Out

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