Apropos of nothing Flappy Bird floated across my mind today. It struck me odd how little people seem to refer to it now, given how popular it got. I was reading its Wikipedia page; the game was pulling in $50k USD a day and the dev pulled it because he thought it was too addictive. Or possibly because he didn’t feel like he could defend against the claims that he’d ripped off other games and got in over his head. It’s a fascinating story.
But the game itself I never got into. I tried it once on a friend’s phone and quickly had no more interest in playing it. I’m curious to know from people who played it a lot at the time, was it a good game? Does it hold up? Or was it a relatively generic knock-off that got famous because catapulting random ideas into the global consciousness is just a thing the internet does sometimes?
Hey! I think this is a FANTASTIC question, because the answers reveal the diverse ways we all categorize what a “good” game is.
The straightforward simple nature of it like TicTacToe makes it good.
The easy on boarding to new players makes it good.
The simple task and challenge while not deep, is competitive enough to make it good.
Even bad games can become good under the right circumstances or perspectives. Sonic 06 is generally considered to be one of the worst games in the franchise, and an overall bad game. But it’s great to watch others play it because of how bad it is. It’s great to watch speed runs, or the odd glitch hunting videos. Playing it JUST to experience how bad it is can even be enjoyable and “good” to anyone that likes playing bad games.
My point is, what makes a game truly “good” isn’t just a single thing about it that someone might like, but rather, a combination of all those “good” things about it that work together in a way to create a better experience than the sum of its parts. Multiple “good” things all working together to make an experience that is uniquely “good” to that game.
So what’s interesting, is that all the different perspectives in this thread prove fairly well that Flappy Bird was indeed a good game.
However, the one part about it that people haven’t mentioned yet that I appreciated about it most:
Was the fact that the bird had some of the worst physics ever.
Having a linear jump up, but an accelerating decent down that despite its description, felt like juggling a rock in high gravity more than making a bird flap it’s wings.
It was SO UNINTUITIVE, that even with the quick onboarding it felt like playing a carnival game that was rigged for you to lose. And just like those games, there was a trick to getting good at it. And that trick created a learning curve needed to actually get gud at Flappy Bird. One that in combination with its easy and simple concept, quick onbaording, and competitive design (leader boards) made it honestly a great experience at the time that I feel hasn’t quite been captured since.
(With the closest being maybe Baby Steps or Getting Over It, but neither have such a simple design. Rather a simple mechanic pushed to its limit.)
Anyway, thanks for asking this! Imo, Flappy Bird was definitley a good game worth talking about.
LMAO thank you, I spent a while trying to figure out what title to give this post. I generally don’t like sorting games (or art in general) into “good” and “bad” buckets, but I didn’t really have a good handle on why people liked Flappy Bird, and I didn’t want to make assumptions about which parts of the game make it good or bad in people’s minds. “Is it good” is the most generic criterion I could come up with, so I went with that and hoped people would expand on their reasons in the comments. I appreciate the thoughtfulness of the comments (yours and others), it’s given me a lot to think about ❤️