What flaps like a bird but may not be the innocent time-killer you remember from a decade ago? Flappy Bird returned to cellphones this week, surprising mobile gamers. The initiative promised “the official Flappy Bird,” but others have questioned who's behind it and their goals.
First, Dong Nguyen, the original developer, isn't behind this new version. These creators bought the Flappy Bird trademark and are making a game based on it. This is “official” legally, but it's probably not what many players expected.
That's odd, but not a major issue. However, Varun Biniwale began investigating, and his findings from pages on the new Flappy Bird site suggest a game with strong Web3 crypto integration.
Game assets urge players to link crypto wallets and “mine points” to “TAP, FLAP AND WIN!” Crypto influencers appear on the game's API leaderboard. Biniwale links the project's developers to Web3/crypto projects.
Even if this is all still extremely circumstantial, just because development could have been headed in one way doesn't guarantee the completed program would attempt to convert us to crypto at every turn. However, this IP has a long history of harmful, addictive features, which we don't want in crypto.
It's too early to accuse this effort of anything other than trying to bring Flappy Bird back, but we'll be watching this story closely once the app releases.
