It’s a popular hobby for some geeks to transform games into arcade cabinets, some even going as far as to come up with custom cabinet designs for their creations. And considering how much hype “Flappy Bird” managed to stir up when it came out a year ago, and the simplicity of the game, it’s no surprise that it was chosen for such a project recently.
BayTek, a company from Wisconsin, have just revealed their new “Flappy Bird” machine, cloning the gameplay of “Flappy Bird”, and transferring it to an arcade experience flawlessly. The arcade machine has only one button (as can be expected, given the gameplay of “Flappy Bird”), and all players have to do is keep pushing it to get the bird to jump.
It’s not known if the cabinet is going to enter mass production and make its way to any real venues anytime soon, although it would certainly be interesting to follow its progress, if just because of the sheer popularity of the original “Flappy Bird”, and the interesting situation it created on the market.
When the game came out on mobile devices, it became an unexpected hit, despite being rather poorly made, with many people expressing their rage on Twitter and other social networks. Before long, various publications were covering the game, as well as the community’s reactions to its difficulty. In the end, the game’s immense popularity resulted in millions of downloads and hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits for its developer.
Dong Nguyen, who made the game, was actually not very happy with how it turned out, however. According to him, his sudden rise to fame and newfound fortune have made his life very difficult, and he was also disappointed by the addictive nature of the game which, he stated, wasn’t a positive influence on those who played it. Due to those factors, Nguyen eventually decided to pull the game from app stores, although he subsequently released it again after community pressure.
While many have tried to copy the game’s success shortly after its rise – and fall – this was an obviously impossible task from the very beginning, as “Flappy Bird” rose to fame based purely on luck, and the fact that several prominent Twitter users were discussing it at the same time. The game didn’t actually stand out with any serious design qualities on its own, so it’s unlikely that it would have made it so big without that community attention. And subsequently, attempts to replicate it by cloning its gameplay elements exactly, was an idea doomed to failure from the very beginning. Viral interest is hard to stimulate artificially, as many have found out the hard way.