Flappy Bird mobile screen.

In the last week or so, just about everyone in Costa Rica who uses an Internet connection learned about the strange circumstances leading to the sudden rise and fall of the mobile application Flappy Bird. Video game blogger Herberth Castro of La Nacion weighed in on the Flappy Bird enigma with sharp commentary that suggests the strong possibility of a 21^st century mass hysteria occurrence.

Since there is a very small probability that one or two readers of the Costa Rica Star do not know about Flappy Bird, we defer to Wikipedia for the synopsis:

Flappy Bird is a mobile game notorious for its difficulty level developed in Hanoi by Vietnam-based developer Dong Nguyen. The game, which was released on May 24, 2013, was removed from both Apple’s App Store and Google Play by its creator on February 10th, 2014.

In January 2014, [Flappy Bird] topped the Free Apps chart in the US and Chinese App Stores, and later on that month topped the same section of the UK App Store where it was touted as “the new Angry Birds.” It ended January as the most downloaded App on the App Store. The Android version of Flappy Bird was released to the Google Play store on January 30th, 2014. In early 2014, the game was earning around $50,000 a day in revenue through its in-game advertising.

By that point, Flappy Bird was being downloaded and discussed in Costa Rica with certain wonderment. Mr. Castro of La Nacion learned about it some time last week, and he took the time to write a lengthy analysis of his experience and observations about the curious demise of Flappy Bird and its strange effect on our collective psyche.

Flappy Bird turned out to be a simple app with an even simpler objective: To tap the screen of the mobile device so that a pixelated bird could fly between a narrow pass between two pipes that evoke the design of the Super Mario Brothers video game franchise.

I tested the game, and the first thought to come to my mind was: The world has gone mad. What I did not know at this point was just how deep that madness went, and how it was just getting started at that point.

My first focus of interest was to investigate why the global madness for such a simple interface based game. I thought maybe there were multiple screens and a progressive challenge; alas, that was not the case. The game is a single screen, infinite side-scroller that changes the position of the green pipes according to a vaguely random algorithm along with unassuming awards and an online table of high scores that were highly suspect.

So this is the story of a bird’s flight against gravity through cruel green pipes. I must be crazy.

Mr. Castro then observed how he was hardly the only one in Costa Rica or around the world who was going crazy as a result of Flappy Bird.

Notwithstanding, the history of Flappy Bird is even more curious because, once it became a tremendous mobile hit, the game’s developer -a 29-year old man who still lives with his parents in Vietnam- pulled the game from the app stores because he could not take it anymore. Considering that Dong Nguyen was making $50,000 as day on Flappy Bird mobile installs, this could be labeled as nothing less than pure craziness.

In the past, the Costa Rica Star has reported on mobile app developers in this country who have found a modicum of success and could only dream about achieving a hit such as Nguyen’s Flappy Bird. The developers of Pota-Toss were even offered jobs by Rovio, the developer of Angry Birds, but even this much success does not compare to Flappy Bird.

Mr. Castro then reported on the expansion of the Flappy Bird mass hysteria after the game developer explained that he was worried that the app was becoming addictive, and that he never intended to design such an aberration:

The world has gone crazy again. Although it became clear that the young man from Vietnam wanted nothing but peace (something that people from Costa Rica can identify with), some Flappy Bird followers did not like this philosophy and issued death threats against Nguyen. Thankfully, none of those threats came to fruition, but still…

Mr. Castro finishes his Flappy Bird dissertation with a look at the multiple cloned versions and how the world has changed since the app reached critical mass. The hysteria clearly continues and refuses to die: at the same time this article was published, there were 83 million other online news media articles reporting on this collectively psychogenic phenomenon.