After a decade of its sudden disappearance and countless clones, the original Flappy Bird is making a comeback. According to a press release, avid fans under the banner of the Flappy Bird Foundation have acquired the rights to the mobile smash hit game. Flappy Bird will return as a native mobile app for iOS and Android in 2025, but you’ll still be able to play it on other platforms before then. The team plans to bring the game to other platforms, including desktop and mobile web, starting this fall.
The Flappy Bird Foundation has some big plans for the revived title, some of which were shown off in the trailer: while maintaining the original game design is key, we can also expect new modes, characters, progression, and multiplayer challenges.
The combination of difficult gameplay and a crude art style (including pipes that seem heavily inspired by Mario games) made Flappy Bird a huge hit. Tapping the screen to flap the bird’s wings and get it through gaps in the pipes has won the hearts of millions of gamers — more than 100 million, according to the Flappy Bird Foundation.
Flappy Bird debuted in May 2013, but it didn’t take off until January of the following year. Developer Dong Nguyen soon revealed that the game was making $50,000 a day from ads. But Flappy Bird’s success was too much for its developer, and Nguyen removed the game from the App Store and Google Play in February 2014, likely for altruistic reasons (though he did publish another version for Amazon Fire TV later that year).
“Flappy Bird was designed to be played for a few minutes when you’re relaxing,” he told Forbes, “but it has become an addictive product, and I think that’s the problem. The best way to solve this problem is to delete Flappy Bird. Flappy Bird is gone forever.” Thankfully for fans (though maybe not for those who were reselling old phones with the original game still installed), “forever” doesn’t necessarily mean forever.
