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Hi, welcome to another episode of Cold Fusion. Most app developers would love a scenario where an app they made in 3 days just starts earning money. But $50,000 per day, now that's beyond anyone's wildest dreams. But for a small time Vietnamese developer, that was exactly the case. His app kept growing like there was no tomorrow. It was a digital social contagion. Flappy Bird. It is the number one app in over 100 countries. It's a global sensation. You couldn't go anywhere in the mid-2010s without knowing about it. But yet, with the push of a button, the creator of the app deleted it forever.
So, why would he do such a thing? The common story is straightforward. The developer, Dong Nuan, felt guilty that his game was too addictive. Overwhelmed by fame, he killed the game to give the players their lives back. It was a nice clean tale of a humble man rejecting fortune, but scratched the surface and a much messier picture starts to emerge. Accusations of stolen assets, rumors of a Nintendo lawsuit, conspiracies about bot-driven downloads, a decadel long trademark fight that almost no one knows about. There's even a serious question of whether Flappy Bird itself was a copy of someone else's game. So, what really happened? Was this a rare case of a creator walking away from a gold mine on
principle? Or was something more chaotic going on behind the scenes? In this episode, we're going to flap right into it. You are watching Telef Fusion TV. Flappy Bird was born into a very specific moment in tech history. In the early 2010s, the mobile app store was only a few years old. It was still a digital frontier of sorts. Smartphones were finally mainstream, but app development was still the wild west. It hadn't yet been swallowed up by mega publishers. The bar to entry was low. The audience was massive, and any developer with a halfdeent idea could ship something on a weekend and theoretically reach hundreds of millions
of people overnight. Yes, before Vibe Coders, that really was the case. The best part about all of this was the discovery was organic. People found apps because their friends found apps that they liked and wanted to tell others. The network effect was on full display. Stories of unknown developers and small studios becoming overnight millionaires of simple games was starting to emerge. From Temple Run to Angry Birds, mobile gaming was experiencing its first true gold rush. Enter Dong Nuan. In 2013, Newan was a 28-year-old programmer living with his parents in Hanoi, Vietnam. He founded a small game studio called Gears all the way back in 2005.
He was just 20 years old at the time. By day, he wrote software for taxi GPS units, and by night, he made games. His childhood was modest. His parents couldn't afford to buy him or his younger brother a proper game console, but eventually they got hold of a cloned Nintendo, a common knockoff at the time in Vietnam, and this event would change the trajectory of his life. Dong spent hours obsessively playing Super Mario Brothers. He was completely captivated by the simple idea of controlling something on a screen. He taught himself to code. And when he was 16, he built himself his own chess computer game. By the early 2010s, he was making mobile games heavily inspired by the 8-bit
sidescrollers of the NES era. Easy enough to learn, but punishing to master. Unfortunately for Newan, none of them really took off. But Dong had an idea. He felt that mobile games at the time were too cluttered. He wanted something that you could play with just one thumb, holding onto a train strap with your other hand, for example. So, in the spring of 2013, he repurposed a bird character from a previous unfinished project. And over the course of about three evenings after work, he built Flappy Bird. The game was almost embarrassingly simple. Tap to fly up and stop tapping to fall. Don't hit the pipes. And that was it. How had nobody else thought of this before? Well, hold
that thought. So, Flappy Bird launched on the iOS App Store in May of 2013. completely free, monetized entirely through a small banner ad at the top. And then pretty much nothing happened for months. Downloads were essentially zero. By all accounts, it looked to be yet another flop. Then in early January in 2014, something completely unexplained happened. Almost overnight, Flappy Bird took off. To this day, nobody, including Newan himself, can fully explain what triggered it. There was no big article, no celebrity tweet, no PewDiePie video that started the spread. It should be noted that there was a Flappy Bird
PewDiePie video, but that came later after the game was already popular. Some speculate that it was the new wave of iPhones gifted over Christmas, combined with App Store ranking momentum. Others have less charitable theories, which we'll get into in a bit. Whatever the cause, the game went from number 80 to number one in just a few weeks. By mid January, it was topping the app store charts in over a 100 countries. By February, it had been downloaded more than 50 million times and was reportedly generating $50,000 a day in ad revenue. And this is where things start to get strange. The reaction wasn't joyful. It was angry. People hated this game. They hated how hard it was. They hated that
they just couldn't stop playing it. Twitter timelines were filled with people threatening to throw their phones across the room. There are entire YouTube videos of people smashing their phones with hammers in frustration over their high scores. $400. And the critics piled on. Many accused Newan of stealing. The green pipes looked very obviously lifted from Super Mario and the color palette was effectively identical to the classic Mario Grassland levels. The gaming site Kotaku ran a now infamous article whose original headline accused Newan of making $50,000 a day off quote ripped art. They later softened their language, but the damage was already done. Then came the misinformation. On February
1st, multiple outlets reported a story that a 16-year-old in Chicago had stabbed his brother 17 times after losing a Flappy Bird high school competition. The story went viral and it was completely fabricated. In fact, it was pulled from a satirical news website. But the panic had already set in. A new narrative. Flappy Bird was now dangerous. Next, we'll see how the success of Flappy Bird caused Dong's life to spiral out of control, and we'll see what he did about it. But first, for some of my videos, I spend hours talking to experts and conducting interviews. I also brainstorm ideas with the team to do so. Recently, I've been using this little thing as my trusty sidekick. It's so that important details don't slip
through the cracks. Now, you might ask, why not just use your phone to record? Well, for me, a phone wasn't a good solution. Notifications interrupt things. Recording drains the battery. And even if you record everything, nobody wants to sit through hours of audio looking for a specific moment. That's where Plaude Note Pro comes in. It's basically a note-taking assistant that lets me stay focused on conversations instead of having to worry about taking notes. What's impressive is how small it is. It's about the size of a credit card, slips into a wallet, and can even attach magnetically to the back of your phone. It fits right into my workflow, too. I hit record, have the conversations as usual, and afterwards,
Plaude transcribes everything. It even identifies the speakers, pulls out key points and action items, and it lets me search conversations later using Ask Plaude. Sometimes I take interviews months in advance, and I have to go back and find one particular quote or a piece of information. And that's what I particularly like about Plaude. I can find a quote, decision, or idea weeks later without digging through hours of recordings. It also works for phone calls, meetings, and day-to-day conversations where there's information that you'll want to revisit later. And importantly, Plaude is built with privacy and security in mind. And that is essential when you're recording conversations or research phone calls.
And what I do like is that it doesn't replace thinking. It just handles the tedious part of capturing and organizing information so I can spend more time analyzing it. As someone who spends a lot of time researching and talking to people, it became worth it the moment I saw how much time it saved me. If all of this sounds useful for your work, check out the link in the description and use my code called Fusion for 17% off during Prime Day promotion. There's also a 30-day free return policy so you can try it out risk-free and see if it fits into your workflow. And now back to the episode. Let's catch up with Dong and see how he's doing. Back in Vietnam, the local press had deduced the developer's
identity. His face was suddenly all over Vietnamese newspapers and TV. Paparazzi stalked his parents' house. He couldn't go outside without being recognized. His parents, he later said, became seriously worried about his well-being. Online, things were even uglier. death threats, racist abuse, strangers messaging him about how the game had ruined their marriages, made their kids fail school, gotten them fired, and one particularly memorable message claimed 13 kids at a single high school had broken their phones over the game and were still buying new ones to keep playing. Some of these messages were almost certainly jokes. They were trolling, but Newan took them at face value. You see, English wasn't his first language, and
also he had struggled with video game addiction as a kid. He failed high school tests because he was playing Counter-Strike instead of studying. So, it was no surprise that the guilt did land hard on him. He stopped sleeping. He stopped going outside and he couldn't focus on anything else. Then, on February 8th, 2014, Newan tweeted something that would become one of the most legendary posts in all of tech history. He apologized to his players. He said he couldn't take it anymore, and he announced that he would pull the game in 22 hours. The internet completely lost its mind.
Many assumed that it was a marketing stunt and the game would be back in no time. Tech commentators on cable news called the announcement nonsense and speculated that it either had to be a stunt or quiet pressure from Nintendo. Others were in a mad rush to download the game before it disappeared. Flappy Bird racked up another 10 million downloads in those final 22 hours. Then, exactly as promised, on February 9th, Flappy Bird was gone. pulled from the app store, pulled from Google, never to return. Just like that. In the weeks after, people with phones that still had Flappy Bird installed started listing them on eBay for thousands of dollars.
Some listings hit 5 figure prices before eBay started taking them down. But if Dong New Yuan's intention was to stay away from the spotlight, this announcement did the exact opposite. The official version of the story is straightforward. Newan has consistently said that the game became too addictive. The attention was destroying his mental health and pulling the game off the app store was the only way to reclaim his life. But almost immediately, the internet refused to accept that. People online became split into five main theories, which I'll get into now.
Theory number one, Nintendo sued him. This was the most popular explanation at the time. Ask anyone even today and they'll say that the pipes really do look like Mario and the art style was derivative. And because of this, people assume that it had to be a quite legal takedown. But Nintendo has publicly denied it. A company spokesman told the Guardian that despite usually staying silent on rumors, they wanted to make crystal clear that there was no legal action being taken. So, we can safely strike this one out. Theory number two, the download spike was fake. Some suggested that Newan used bots to push up the game in the charts. The sudden, inexplicable rise from number 80 to number one was suspicious, and
eventually the guilt got to him and he took it down. Newan's response was simple. If it had been fake, would Apple really have let it run for months. Nothing in his previous behavior suggested any kind of manipulation campaign, and eventually no proof was ever produced, so this one is unlikely. Theory number three, he stole the game. Now, this is the part that a lot of people don't know about. There's actually a 2011 flash game called Pew versus Cactus by a French developer.
It has a suspiciously familiar yellow bird flapping between green obstacles in the desert setting. The visual similarities to Flappy Bird are hard to ignore. The story goes, Newan eventually got quietly sued by the original maker, or just couldn't take the guilt. Whether New Yan copied it directly, was inspired by it, or arrived at the same idea independently is genuinely unclear, but he's always insisted that his work was original. We could give him the benefit of the doubt here. It's a simply enough concept for the limited touchscreen input method, but for me personally, the design of the bird does make me raise an eyebrow. Who draws birds like that? Both creators, it's a bit fishy to me, so I
can't personally rule this one out. Theory number four, it was a marketing stunt. Pull the game, generate massive press, and watch the value of existing copies sore, then quietly re-release. And it's true, phones with Flappy Bird installed were selling on eBay for thousands afterwards. But Newan never sold the rights, never re-released the original, and he walked away from what could have been guaranteed millions in continued revenue. If it was a stunt, it was the worst executed stunt in history, that's for sure. So, I think we can safely rule this one out. And theory number five, and this is the one that most people accept now, he just couldn't take it. When I was reading his Rolling
Stone interview, I got the impression that he's not some savvy businessman wanting to make millions. He's an introverted programmer in his parents' house who went from practically a no-name individual to being mobbed by reporters, drowning in hate mail, and watching his quiet life evaporate in real time. He genuinely seems to have believed the messages that people were sending him, the ones claiming that Flappy Bird was ruining their lives, and he wanted no part in being responsible for that. But after pulling the game, Newan kept developing. He released more games like Swing Copters, which came out in August of 2014. It was punishingly hard, deliberately less addictive, and was largely ignored by the public. Some
of you are probably hearing about it for the first time. Then came Ninja Spinky Challenges in 2017. None of these games came close to Flappy Bird's reach. And based on what Newan has said since, that's exactly how he wanted it. But there is one final twist. In September of 2024, a group calling itself the Flappy Bird Foundation announced that they were reviving the game, complete with new levels, multiplayer modes, and well, NFT integration. If you saw my previous video on NFTts, you know how that goes. Now, Nunan hearing about this immediately took to social media to make it clear that he had no involvement. He hadn't sold the rights and he didn't support crypto. So, what happened? Well,
as it turns out, the trademark had been allowed to lapse one year earlier. Newan didn't renew it, and a third party swooped in, picked it up, and made it theirs through a legal process that took almost a decade to play out. It was announced Flappy Bird would be coming back. The original Flappy Bird. It tried to mislead people into believing that this was the original Flappy Bird, you know, and it hinted that the actual creator of the game was involved, even though he wasn't, and it's actually just a crypto scam. It was there to pedal NFTTS. Whoever's behind this is an absolute buffoon. NFTTS in the year 2024, you've got to be off your gourd. But the cultural significance of Flappy Bird still does live on. More recently, and in a
positive vein, the YouTube channel Enginezy built a fully functional mechanical version of Flappy Bird from scratch. When Flappy Bird was released, I was just out of university and working the 9 to5. The narrative I got about the tech industry was to grow at all costs. And then I hear about the story of Flappy Bird and its creator, a guy who built a cultural phenomenon, and then he just walked away. Even if it was heavily inspired, which we can never truly know. He didn't try to ride the hype. He didn't sell to a publisher. He didn't squeeze it for every last advertising dollar. Compare that to almost any other viral app developer back then and since.
Most of them chased the next round of funding. Most tried to milk a hit franchise into oblivion. Most would have happily traded a few months of bad press for a lifetime of $50,000 a day. The Angry Bird studio went public and somehow has three movies. Candy Crush spawned an entire monetization industry. The default move when you hit it big in tech is just to keep going, scale up, and never let go. But Newan looked at all of that and said, "Nope, not for me." It's foolish to some and admirable to many. I've got no problems with it. But over a decade later, with mobile gaming now overtaken with microtransactions, ga mechanics, and engagement optimized slop, his choice to value a quiet life over endless scale is
noble. And maybe that's the real legacy of Flappy Bird. Not the game itself, not even its bizarre virality, but the very rare reminder that sometimes it's okay to tap on that exit button. So, as always, what do you guys think? Did Dong Newan make the right call? Or was he a fool to leave a once in a generation legacy on the table? Anyway, that's about it from me. Thanks so much for watching all the way till the end. It means a lot. If you want to see anything else interesting, feel free to check out any other videos on this channel. So, my name is Dogo and you've been watching Cold Fusion and I'll catch you again soon for the next episode. Cheers, guys.
Have a good one.
