There's something fishy about the Flappy Bird revival

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Ten years after its sudden disappearance, Flappy Bird is making a comeback—but something about this revival doesn't quite add up.

Articles like this around the web published today talk about the recent 'The Flappy Bird Foundation Group', which supposedly "secured" the rights to the Flappy Bird trademark, and is relaunching the once acclaimed game in 2025.

I'm not going to pretend to be a laywer, but this USPTO page seems to suggest the trademark expired and was claimed by one "GAMETECH HOLDINGS, LLC" in 2023. And this IGN article says that the trademark was then "acquired" by "The Flappy Bird Foundation" some time later. The original developer of Flappy Bird does not seem to be involved in any of this whatsoever.

Apart from the strange timeline for the re-release (the original Flappy Bird was developed in two to three days), I found the new flappybird.org website a little stranger.

With its overly polished look, the art feels eerily similar to the countless clones that have flooded the market over the years—after all, Flappy Bird is one of the most cloned games of all time. So, what's really different about this "official" revival?

It feels quite polished for what seems to be something made by a "team of passionate fans committed to sharing the game with the world". Who is behind this, and what's the goal? How are they making money? The trademark couldn't have been free, so what's the plan?

A quick google search for site:flappybird.org reveals some pages on the site.

Some appear to be simple variations of the landing page (ranging from minor copywriting changes to a "Coming Soon" page), and one appears to be a placeholder for a future merch shop, but there are a couple pages that really stand out.

The community page includes some of the same information from the home page, but also includes links for "Collaborations", "Interviews" and a Press Kit. The only link that works is the Collaborations reach out button.

The collaborations page is barebones, but suggests there are some kind of upcoming Flappy Bird game jams. Interesting!

The last page "3-$Flap" reveals what this all may really be about.

The page states that the "legendary Flappy Bird™ is back and will fly higher than ever on Solana as it soars into Web 3.0" and that "Artists, developers and creators can build, play and earn from the legendary Flappy Bird IP" and "Flappy Bird will now be the world’s first open-source, community owned Web 2 and Web 3 game."

This page seems to suggest that the original plan of the project revolved around cryptocurrency and "Web 3.0". Some people may refer to these kinds of projects as "grifts".

I also noticed that the website is built with WordPress. As a result, its sitemap is fully public, which allows us to enumerate the site's pages.

Using this, I found that the oldest pages seem to be from around December 2023, and many of these pages reference 'web3' and crypto in a few places.

Furthermore, /flappywebgl and /flappywebgl2 actually feature some kind of prototype of the game itself, which is neat.

It's just a standard Flappy Bird clone, nothing particularly special there. But the game is embedded from a Google Cloud bucket... with the directory listing enabled!

There are two builds that are particularly interesting here. One is dated 2024-08-08 and is titled v1.4.2.

This is a far more developed version of the game from the simple flappywebgl prototypes embedded on the WordPress blog. It's playable and has a polished interface. Interestingly, while the flappywebgl used a distinct character design, this version uses the iconic Flappy bird. Perhaps they acquired the trademark some time in between?

test19 is dated 2024-09-12 (today), and is a debug build of a much rougher game.

Both builds feature a news section that load data from staging-api.flappybird.org.

Speaking of this API, the game also loads in a leaderboard.

Naturally, the same endpoint on api.flappybird.org returns a similar list, although a little longer.

Some Google searches show that these names are the usernames of various "Crypto Influencers". Of course, there is no way to verify these are the same people, but some of them follow either @flappy_bird or @ton_blockchain on Twitter.

I was also able to find the Twitter account of the person responsible. They link to their game development company "1208 Productions"

Their website states that they are "pioneering Web 3".

The website lists various crypto projects, including 'Deez', an NFT brand. They also list some notable figures they "consulted with".

I'm up too late looking at this. This exploration definitely helped me gain a greater understanding of what we're looking at, but it still left me with so many questions.

Does this Flappy Bird revival have 'web3' and cryptocurrency roots? Absolutely.

Is it strange that none of the initial reporting on today's launch mentions the web3 aspect of the game? Yes.

Is this Flappy Bird revival a "crypto ponzi scheme grift"? I don't know.

Is this Flappy bird revival authorized by the original creator? Almost certainly not.

Is this a somewhat shady project with the goal of capitalizing off the nostalgic appeal of a beloved game while quietly aiming to make money from cryptocurrency and Web3 integration? It sure seems like it.