Last week, the FlappyBird Foundation announced the return of the FlappyBird game. However, while the organization has been describing it as a triumphant return of a classic mobile game, Flappy Bird's original developer Dong Nguyen stopped short of saying it was a return - in fact, he said he wasn't involved at all.
This morning, Nguyen posted on X (for the first time since 2017!) that he was not "selling anything." In an announcement shared with the media last week, the FlappyBird Foundation wrote that it had "acquired the rights from Gametech Holdings, LLC," which acquired the trademark from Nguyen, but this does not appear to be the result of a deal between him and the organization.
X user Samperson discovered that Gametech filed an objection to Nguyen’s FlappyBird trademark in 2023. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office determined that his trademark had been abandoned and terminated his claim to the mark in January this year.
The FlappyBird Foundation didn't say Nguyen was involved in its announcement, but they paid considerable attention to mobilizing players' nostalgia when promoting the game. The game's first trailer spends more than half its time talking about the game's popularity and disappointment at its sudden disappearance in 2013, before declaring that "in 2024, Flappy Bird will fly again."
Cybersecurity researcher Varun Biniwale pointed out that some hidden pages on the Flappy Bird website indicate that cryptocurrency may be included in the release of the game. One of the pages, which appears to have been deleted (archived here), said FlappyBird would "fly higher than ever on Solana as it soars into Web 3.0" and invited players to "build, create, play and take a stake."
Currently, "FlappyBird" is about to land on iOS and Android platforms. Don't expect it to be the same FlappyBird you're familiar with, though, because it really seems to be gone forever.
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