“…in the aftermath of the oh-so-tragic death of Flappy Bird, the question we should be asking ourselves is: Why do we care?” —Michael Errigo

Footsteps pound the floor of a dorm hallway, a sense of urgency in every stride. The feet find their destination as a young man throws open the door to his friend’s room with a fervor that only stems from situations of pure emergency.

“112!” the student yells with excitement, “I just got 112 on Flappy Bird, what up!”

This is the unbridled joy that comes about only in the rare instance that one reaches a true payoff of labor, a gargantuan achievement. This excitement stems from an app called Flappy Bird.

The premise is simple enough: Tap the screen to keep a bird afloat as you guide him through a series of green pipes. But actually completing said task is much harder than it sounds. The extreme difficulty of the app has become its trademark as reviews of the game in the App Store contain lines such as “Its side-affects are worse than cocaine/meth” and “Satan made it.”

Next in the long line of mobile games that have experienced a meteoric rise in success (following the likes of Temple Run, Angry Birds and, of course, Candy Crush Saga), Flappy Bird was launched in May 2013 by independent Vietnamese game developer Dong Nguyen. Since an extreme sales surge in mid-January, the game has been downloaded more than 50 million times and was reportedly making $50,000 a day.

But all of that came to an abrupt and surprising end Sunday when Nguyen deleted the game from the iPhone and Android app stores. In a series of tweets, the creator claims the game ruined his life and he was deleting it because many people were “overusing” it. The surprising removal was even more puzzling considering how much money other popular apps have produced in the past. Surely Flappy Bird was well on its way to the highest echelon of pointless mobile games.

Thankfully, users who had already downloaded the app can still play it. The sudden deletion appears to have created a market for those people still seeking to try the game, as phones with the app installed are being listed for sale on sites such as eBay for four- or five-figure prices.  

To understand the end of this saga, one must consider the beginning. The game spread like any other trend in the youth community: by word of mouth. Those who had played it told their friends about this new addictive and challenging app that was sure to be the next Candy Crush Saga. Soon, Flappy Bird high scores became measuring sticks for coolness and overall achievement in life.

The fact that its popularity reached the point that Dong Nguyen felt like Frankenstein says something about the growing app culture in America. Whatever your game of choice might be, it seems like everyone is playing something constantly. And as much as we like to tell ourselves that these games require some sort of skill or talent, they don’t. Not at all. Our high scores will fade as another app assumes the position of mindless distraction king. And in the aftermath of the oh-so-tragic death of Flappy Bird, the question we should be asking ourselves is: Why do we care?