Flappy Bird – the smartphone sensation which caused so much drama almost a decade ago – has found its way onto the Analogue Pocket via a new OpenFPGA core.
Ported by somhi, Flappy Bird is based on the original game by Vietnamese video game artist and programmer Dong Nguyen. Initially released in May 2013, the game wouldn't go viral until the start of the following year, when it became the most downloaded free title on the iOS App Store. Nguyen claimed that he was earning as much as $50,000 a day from the adverts which ran within the game and famously removed the game from both the App Store and Android Google Play store on February 10th, 2014, claiming that he felt guilty over its addictive gameplay.
"Flappy Bird is an arcade-style game launched in May 2013 and gained popularity in early 2014," reads the project's GitHub page. "The user controls the bird constantly moving to the right and the objective is to navigate the bird through pair of pipes that have gaps placed at random heights. The bird will ascend for a short distance if the player touches the screen (a button configured on FPGA) and ends if the bird falls to the ground or hits a pipe. Points are rewarded each time the player crosses a pipe."