The recent announcement of Flappy Bird's resurrection as a blockchain-based game sent ripples throughout the gaming community. All I can think about is this being the perfect storm of misplaced nostalgia and crypto opportunism.
Flappy Bird was a product of lightning in a bottle back in 2013.
The simplistic yet addictive game, combined with its rampant viral spread, made it a cultural touchstone for but a moment in time. That moment is long since past, and trying to revive it now, especially under the trappings of blockchain technology, feels like nothing more than a ham-fisted cash-in on fading memories.
At best, the Flappy Bird Foundation's claims of being the "true successors" of the game which they are copying are dubious. Okay, perhaps they bought the trademark, but with it did not come the soul of what made Flappy Bird special. The original creator, Dong Nguyen, famously pulled the game from app stores due to concerns about its addictive nature. His recent statement of condemnation against this new venture spoke volumes of how disconnected the original vision was from this crypto-fueled reboot.
The foundation has added insult to injury, trying to make its efforts legitimate with the addition of the developer of Piou Piou vs Cactus, a game Flappy Bird was allegedly based on, to the ranks. What perhaps seemed like a clever move to add some credible heft to its coffers actually feels like an overt attempt to patch together something that resembles authenticity where no authentic threads truly exist.
What that tells me, especially with launching Flappy Bird as a "GameFi" title on Telegram, is this: this is a project that has much more to do with riding the crypto wave than it does with the concerns of upkeep or betterment of the gaming experience on which its popularity was wholly based.
In fact, a statement concerning the launch of a token really nails it: "this is not about designing an enjoyable, addictive game, it's all about creating another vehicle for speculation and profit".
This whole debacle raises a few very interesting questions about intellectual property in the digital age. Just because a trademark is abandoned doesn't mean that the essence of what made that property valuable is fair game. Legal ownership and cultural ownership are two very different things, and the Flappy Bird Foundation simply appears to be banking on its customers not knowing any different.
This also points to the still-ongoing trend of trying to shoehorn blockchain tech into places where it's neither needed nor wanted. Flappy Bird required no tokens or play-to-earn mechanics to become an international sensation, as its success lay in simplicity and accessibility, the latter shares a mutually exclusive relationship with many of the barriers to entry common in blockchain-based games.
As it were, the foundation can't seem to "stop thinking about the game" since its removal in 2014. This says more about fixating on past success than moving ahead with actual game development.
It's all a little indicative of some of the larger ills that bother both gaming and crypto, to take every ounce of nostalgia and to engage in monetization often at the cost of what made such experiences great in the first place. Very short-sighted, quicker profits always come at the expense of long-term value creation or any genuine innovation.
Ultimately, this reincarnation of Flappy Bird is condemned to flap its wings and fall, just like its pixelated protagonist. This reaction in the gaming community says it all: people are getting fed up with such overt attempts to cash in on beloved properties masquerading as blockchain innovation. It's time for developers and entrepreneurs to cease trying to resurrect and tokenize ghosts from gaming history and come up with new, much-needed experiences.