The secret of Flappy Bird’s success: easy to learn and difficult to master
Can you come up with any other mobile games which utilize the Nolan Bushnell’s not forgotten mantra of game design?
Nguyen had already made and released a mobile game, Shuriken Block, earlier that month. The object was to stop a cascade of ninja stars from impaling five little men on the screen. This seemed simple enough — the one-word instruction read TAP. Tap the falling star at the right moment, and it would bounce away. But Nguyen understood the mantra of game design that Nolan Bushnell, creator of Pong and founder of Atari, described as “easy to learn and difficult to master.” More recently, indie game makers had taken this to speed-metal extremes with the so-called masocore genre — games that are masochistically hard. Shuriken Block was deceptively ruthless. Even the nimblest player would have trouble lasting a minute before the men were spurting pixelated blood. Nguyen was pleased with the results, but the game languished in the iOS store.
For his new game, Nguyen realized a way to go even simpler: Let the player tap anywhere. All he needed was an idea to build it around. The year before, he’d drawn a pixelated bird on his computer that riffed on Nintendo fish, called Cheep Cheeps. He drew green pipes — a homage to Super Mario Bros. — that the bird would have to navigate. He modeled the game on one of the most masocore analog creations ever: paddleball. The toy was a simple design — just a wooden paddle with a string attached to a rubber ball. But players would be lucky to bounce the ball more than a few times in a row.
Like paddleball, he limited his game to just a couple of elements — the bird and the pipes — and resisted the usual urge to lard the action with new elements as the player progressed. He tuned the physics so that the bird was fighting gravity so strong, even the slightest wrong tap would kill it. Since the deaths would be so frequent, Nguyen wanted to make them entertaining. He tried having the bird explode in a bloody pulp, or bounce back across the ground, before settling on a faceplant. He then sifted through hundreds of sounds before settling on a kung-fu-style thwack to make the bird’s demise even funnier. (The first question he asks me about the game is if it made me laugh.) “The bird is flying along peacefully,” he says with a chuckle, “and all of a sudden you die!”
Before the last flag waved on Reunification Day, Nguyen had gone on Twitter and posted a screen shot of his “new simple game.” Other than a couple of tweets, Nguyen says he put no marketing behind the launch. And, like so many games released into the flood, Flappy Bird flopped. The first mention of the game on Twitter didn’t come until five months later, on November 4th, when someone posted a three-word review. “Fuck Flappy Bird,” it read.
Trying to divine why stuff goes viral is like trying to fly the bird: You end up ass-up on the ground. But “Fuck Flappy Bird” captured the essence of the appeal. The highly addictive Flappy Bird was like a snot-nosed kid paddleballing you in the face. It was begging to be spanked. And you couldn’t resist or stop playing.
Source: Rolling Stone
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