@realabdullahhab: Dong Nguyen lives in Hanoi with his parents, programming taxi GPS systems for a living. In May 2013, he spends one weekend building a simple mobile game—Flappy Bird. You tap. A bird flaps. You avoid pipes. That’s it. He uploads it and it sits dead for 8 months with a few hundred downloads. Then January 2014 hits. A YouTuber plays it. Downloads explode. Within two weeks, Flappy Bird becomes the #1 app in over 100 countries. Dong checks his ad revenue: $10,000 a day. Then $20,000. Then $30,000. Then $50,000 every single day from a game he made in a weekend. His face appears in Vietnamese newspapers. Paparazzi camp outside his house. His parents learn he made Flappy Bird from TV news. But the worst part? The messages. Hundreds of them. Parents saying kids broke phones throwing them in frustration. Workers fired for playing at work. A mother who stopped talking to her children. One message: “13 kids at my school broke their phones because of your game, and they still play it because it’s addicting like crack.” Dong can’t sleep. He’s chain-smoking, hiding at a friend’s apartment. February 8th, 2014, 2 AM, he tweets: “I am sorry Flappy Bird users. 22 hours from now, I will take Flappy Bird down. I cannot take this anymore.” 145,000 retweets. People beg him not to. One person tweets a photo with a gun to their head. Exactly 22 hours later, Dong deletes Flappy Bird. While making $50,000 a day. Phones with it installed sell on eBay for $100,000. Dong goes back to his parents’ house. Back to his simple life. He tells Rolling Stone: “It’s a relief.“​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Abdullah Habib

Open In TikTok:

Region: CA

Tuesday 04 November 2025 18:58:46 GMT