Last April, Nguyen was tapping his iPhone at home while the rest of Hanoi was celebrating Reunification Day, the annual holiday marking the end of the Vietnam War. “When you play game on a smartphone,” he says, with an ever-present cigarette dangling from his lip, “the simplest way is just tapping.” It’s no wonder the world’s hottest game came from here. “One hand holding the train strap.” He’d make a game for them.Īs we talk into the night, hordes of agile pedestrians deftly dodge the Hanoi traffic, screens flickering in their hands like fireflies.
“I pictured how people play,” he says, as he taps his iPhone and reaches his other hand in the air. “It looked too crowded.” Nguyen wanted to make games for people like himself: busy, harried, always on the move. Few games, however, captured the simple power of the Nintendo games of his youth. When he later got his hands on an iPhone, he became fascinated by the possibilities of the touch screen.
Nguyen soon tired of churning out the company’s sports games. So we said he did not have to report to anyone.” “Dong didn’t need a supervisor,” Truong says. Son Bui Truong, Nguyen’s former boss, says the young programmer stood out for his speed, skills and fierce independent streak. Three years later, while studying computer science at a university in Hanoi, he placed in the top 20 of a programming competition and got an internship with one of Hanoi’s only game companies at the time, Punch Entertainment, which made cellphone games.
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Marveling at the power of controlling a character onscreen, Nguyen spent his free time obsessively playing Super Mario Bros.īy 16, Nguyen had learned to code his own computer chess game. But eventually, they were able to purchase a Nintendo, which, like most electronics in Vietnam, was available only in cloned form. Though his father owned a hardware store and his mother worked for the government, his family couldn’t afford Game Boys for him or his younger brother. Growing up in Van Phuc, a village outside Hanoi famous for silk-making, Nguyen (pronounced nwin) never imagined being a world-famous game designer. “I couldn’t predict the success of Flappy Bird.” “I was just making something fun to share with other people,” he says with the help of a translator.
When the country’s first celebrity geek, a boyish, slight guy in jeans and a gray sweater, walks hesitantly up and introduces himself, he measures his words and thoughts carefully, like placing pixels on a screen. Although dot-com millionaires have become familiar in the U.S., in Vietnam’s fledgling tech community they’re all but unheard of. With the international press and local paparazzi searching for him, Nguyen has been in hiding – fleeing his parents’ house to stay at a friend’s apartment, where he now remains. Two weeks after the demise of Flappy, I’m taxiing past pagodas and motorbikes to the outskirts of Hanoi, a crowded, rundown metropolis filled with street vendors selling pirated goods, to meet with Nguyen, who has agreed to share with Rolling Stone his whole story for the first time. Please enable Javascript to watch this video Not even Mark Zuckerberg became rich so fast. Nguyen was earning an estimated $50,000 a day. By February, it was topping the charts in more than 100 countries and had been downloaded more than 50 million times. Instead of charging for Flappy Bird, Nguyen made it available for free, and hoped to get a few hundred dollars a month from in-game ads.īut with about 25,000 new apps going online every month, Flappy Bird was lost in the mix and seemed like a bust – until, eight months later, something crazy happened. The game went live on the iOS App Store on May 24th. Game Never Over: 10 Most Addictive Video Games
The quicker a player tapped the screen, the higher the bird would flap.
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The object was to fly a bug-eyed, big-lipped, bloated bird between a series of green vertical pipes. He wanted it to be simple but challenging, in the spirit of the Nintendo games he grew up playing. Last April, Dong Nguyen, a quiet 28-year-old who lived with his parents in Hanoi, Vietnam, and had a day job programming location devices for taxis, spent a holiday weekend making a mobile game.
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