No greater fury was known to man than some player bashing his cell phone over the counter top again and again in total frustration ‚all for a game. You would think that he was playing some really hardcore, highly difficult game of Herculean proportions ‚but no. Instead, you find out he’s going haywire over this overly-simplistic mobile game that looked like a cross between “Angry Birds and Super Mario”.
Some games would require you to perform complicated moves to do some specific actions to achieve one particular goal. Others had you solving complex puzzles while moving in a graphical, immersive environment. In this particular game the mechanics are simple: tap the screen to get the bird moving up to avoid gravity and incoming obstacles (in this case, pipes). There are no other levels and every pipe you pass merits you one point. This pretty much stays the same as you progress further (if you ever get there, that is). If you touch one of the pipes or fall to the ground then it’s game over.
Directions are simple, game play is repetitive. There is nothing new, nothing particularly inventive that makes it different from any other game out in the market now. In fact, much of the graphics seems to have been ripped off (Super Mario, no less) and the bird (again another game rip-off, although more) comes out as an animated caricature of another internet fad: the duckface. We’re also fully aware of the fact that it can get addicting. But then so is any other successful game. So how come this has become the latest craze for the vast majority of netizens from every corner of the known social world?
A plausible explanation would be: luck. Whether it be self-propagated (orchestrated by the maker himself through bots) or market-driven (frustrated player sharing the pain with others) the conclusion would be that the game just happened to be there, played at the right time and shared at the exact moment. When people are bored and are looking for some new material to ease that boredom with they tend to actually entertain new ideas (no matter how idiotic) and propagate it. This is what birthed the ”Flappy Bird” mania (and all other internet trends, so it seems). Even when the game was eventually pulled off from Google Play and the App Store, many clones and knock-offs rode along its continued hype and had their share of the limelight.
