Flappy Bird Is Coming Back and Stinks of Crypto

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Flappy Bird, the highly addictive, arcade-style mobile game about a bird named Faby is coming back to an app store near you. Unfortunately, there’s a possibility that the iconic game may be tied up in a bunch of crypto nonsense now.

The original Flappy Bird was developed by Vietnamese video game designer Dong Nguyen and released through Nguyen’s game company, DotGears. It was released on iOS in 2013 and came to Android in 2014. The game became an instant sensation, spurring people to waste copious amounts of time wearing out their thumbs on its simple but difficult-to-master pursuits.

Then, somewhat abruptly, Nguyen took the game down. He never totally clarified why he had taken the game down, except to claim that he felt bad about people being addicted to it. And people were pretty addicted to it. That said, original Giz reporting from the time notes that the game’s heavy borrowing of visual elements from Super Mario may have also encouraged the creator to take the game down.

Now, after a long hiatus, Flappy Bird is coming back. The game is set to be released next year, according to a press announcement.  The Verge reports that the rights to the game were acquired by an organization calling itself “The Flappy Bird Foundation Group.” The rights previously belonged to a company called Gametech, LLC, The Verge writes. The people behind the new release describe themselves as a “team of passionate fans committed to sharing the game with the world.”

Unfortunately, there is reason to believe that the new version of Flappy Bird may just be a visually pleasing Trojan horse for some crypto bullshit. This week, web users began chattering about the fact that the game appeared to have ties to a web3 project.

Indeed, archived images of the new Flappy Bird website, and initially shared by Protos, show that the site once contained pages discussing Flappy’s new apparent connection to the Solana blockchain. “The legendary Flappy Bird TM is back and will fly higher than ever on Solana as it soars into Web 3.0,” the site states, in one web-captured image. “Flappy Bird will now be the world’s first open-source, community-owned Web 2 and Web 3 game,” it adds. The page mentioning crypto now returns a 404 error.

Over the weekend, Nguyen returned to Twitter to disavow any relationship with the game. “No, I have no related with their game,” he wrote. “I did not sell anything. I also don’t support crypto.”

Suffice it to say, this is probably not the optimal way for Flappy to return to us all. Gizmodo reached out to the game developers for comment and to ask whether the game has any connection to the crypto industry. We’ll update this post when we receive a reply.