Flappy Bird creator disavows new iPhone version of game. It’s already being called a scam

Original Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen has stated on X that he has nothing to do with the upcoming iOS re-release of the game.

No, I have nothing to do with their game. I don’t provide anything. I also don’t support cryptocurrency.

Dong Nguyen

The Flappy Bird Foundation acquired the rights to the Flappy Bird brand after it was acquired from Gametech Holdings, not Nguyen himself.

In 2014, Nguyen filed an application for the Flappy Bird trademark, but it was still under review, and Nguyen himself was not interested in quickly obtaining the rights. This was taken advantage of by the American company Gametech Holding, which through the court received the rights to the Flappy Bird brand in 2023. That is, Nguyen is not connected with the current project in any way.

However, in 2018, four years after Flappy Bird was removed from the App Store, the US Patent and Trademark Office granted a trademark application for Flappy Bird to another Delaware company called Mobile Media Matters. Legal documents for Mobile Media Matters and Gametech Holding list the same Delaware address.

As for Nguyen’s mentions of cryptocurrency, the situation is also interesting. On the hidden pages of The Flappy Bird Foundation’s website, a mention was found of Flappy Bird flying “higher than ever on Solana, less so than it flies in Web 3.0.” Solana is a decentralized computing platform that uses SOL tokens to pay for transactions.

On September 6, a week before the Flappy Bird re-release was announced, the company’s official X account tweeted about the headset game. All tweets on the topic have now been deleted.

The creator of the original Flappy Bird never made it a secret that he wanted to forget about the game, despite all the success it had. [TechCrunch]