Flappy Bird became a massive online hit for a few months around 2013 before its creator, Dong Nguyen, took it down because he “couldn’t take this anymore.” Now, ten years later, it’s back, but it doesn’t seem like the original creator gave his blessing.
A comeback of Flappy Bird, the short-lived mobile game that once became the most downloaded free game on Apple’s App Store, was announced by an entity that calls itself the “Flappy Bird Foundation Group.” The new game will expand on the originally simple, straightforward game with new game modes and characters, in an attempt to make it more interesting. The website for the project makes it clear that it’s unrelated to the 2013 game or the original creator, but rather, that the project was started following the acquisition of the game’s original trademark and legal rights.
That’s all fine and good, until you look at how the new devs obtained the rights. The Flappy Bird Foundation Group acquired or licensed the rights from another company called Gametech Holdings, LLC, which is also completely unrelated to Dong Nguyen. The problem here is less with the actual devs and more with the way Gametech initially obtained those rights, to begin with. Sam Chiet first noticed this legal bizarreness and published it on Twitter. The trademark wasn’t bought from Nguyen, but rather, said company filed a notice of opposition against Nguyen to claim the abandoned Flappy Bird trademark for free.
Legal records available online show that the notice was first filed in September 2023. Due to an apparent failure by Nguyen to respond to the notice, the trademark was snagged from him by the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board on January 10th this year and granted to Gametech, who seemingly gave the new devs permission to go ahead with the project. This is particularly troublesome once you look at the claims on the project’s official website that the new devs “worked” with “their predecessor” to make this project a reality.
How-To Geek has reached out to Nguyen, and we’re yet to hear back. However, there’s currently no evidence that the original developer approves of the new version, and Nguyen hasn’t had much of an online presence for the past seven years. He is (seemingly) not benefitting economically or otherwise from this new project or the rights. He went on to make several new projects following the takedown of Flappy Bird, but he never brought Flappy Bird back. He also mentioned that he would not sell it to anyone else, and while he could have changed his mind on the issue of his ownership of those rights, we don’t think he has seeing the way things played out here.
Until there’s something else that makes us believe otherwise, this is the mobile game equivalent of defiling a grave for money. It should be noted that several news outlets reported that the original developer gave his blessing for this as it’s what the new developers are claiming. Not only there’s no evidence of that being true, but there’s a lot of evidence for the argument that he’s probably not okay with this.
The original Flappy Bird died in 2014, and unless the creator comes back to give his blessing to any revival attempt, you should not support it. Much less so one that will have things such as loot boxes and microtransactions, of which not a dime is going to the original creator at the moment.
Source: Sam Chiet (Twitter/X), US Patent and Trademark Office
