The popular mini game Flappy Bird took the world by storm only a couple of weeks ago. It became one of the most downloaded games on the App Store as well as the Google Play Store, allegedly earning its developer over $50,000 per day through ad revenue. A few days back, Flappy Bird developer Dong Nguyen announced via Twitter that he was going to take the game down, and he did. A lot of people have been reaching out to him on Twitter in order to find out exactly why has he pulled the game. While Nguyen previously said his decision wasn’t due to any legal troubles, two of his friends tell Reuters that he had actually received a legal notice from Nintendo.
Apparently Nintendo warned him about the similarities between the pipes in Flappy Bird as well as some background art that seemed to have been taken straight out of its Super Mario titles. People might have noticed the similarities, they were there, but would that be enough to make Nintendo threaten legal action? A media representative for Nintendo told Reuters that the bit about the legal notice “sounds very much like a rumor, and if it is, we certainly can’t comment on that.” So even if Nintendo won’t actually confirm if it did or did not send a notice, Nguyen seems to have taken a precautionary step and pulled the game, before being potentially involved in a long, arduous and costly legal dispute. Dong Nguyen has been M.I.A since the day he announced that the game was being pulled, so we’ve yet to hear his side of the story.
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