2014·The social era·skill
Flappy Bird
The most downloaded game in the world, withdrawn by its author because he thought it was doing harm.
An early online video
This Moment began as something you played rather than watched. Originally published on app-store.
- SourceNot an upload originally
- MediaNot held by ViralWorld
What this was
A other classified under birds.
It first appeared in 2014, during the social era.
It is the definitive case of algorithmic randomness making somebody famous overnight, and of what that felt like from the inside. The game was earning a reported fifty thousand dollars a day when Nguyen removed it from both stores on 10 February 2014, saying he felt guilty about how compulsively people were playing it. Almost nobody in the industry believed a developer would do that.
Phones with the game still installed were listed for thousands of dollars. Clones arrived in such numbers that Apple and Google began rejecting submissions with Flappy in the title. It remains the standard reference for two separate arguments: what makes a game addictive, and what a creator owes the people who use their work.
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Grouped by explicit relationships where evidence exists, and by shared theme otherwise.
Behind the recordWhere it came from
There is no original upload to identify: this Moment did not begin as one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is the record.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This Moment began as something you played rather than watched. Originally published on app-store.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
- What happens
- A other classified under birds.