LogInThe original game's developer says he didn't sell the trademark.
Over the weekend, new information surfaced online about the viral "rebirth" of Flappy Bird, suggesting that the project posing as the official return of the legendary side-scroller could be nothing more than a simple crypto scam but on a bigger scale.
For context, the return of Flappy Bird was announced by the Flappy Bird Foundation, the team behind the project, last Thursday, with a flashy trailer and a newly-launched website. Touting the project as "the official Flappy Bird game", the announcement quickly went viral and took the internet by storm, promising new maps, characters, game modes, and multiplayer features. "It's been a decade-long, convoluted journey to get here, but we're so excited to finally begin sharing Flappy Bird once again with the world," the FBF said.
Following the announcement, however, the hype quickly started to fade as the online community began dissecting "the official Flappy Bird®" and uncovering its connections to Web 3.0 and cryptocurrency – things that, in this day and age, are often seen by many as synonymous with fraud.
As documented in a detailed breakdown posted by Web Developer Varun Biniwale, the project's official website contains several hidden pages with additional information about "the official Flappy Bird®," information that, for whatever reason, wasn't mentioned in the trailer, the publicly accessible part of the website, or any social media posts. The most intriguing of these pages was the "3-$Flap" page, which essentially exposed the true nature of the project earlier than the Flappy Bird Foundation likely intended.
The page in question revealed that the new version of Flappy Bird is actually a Web3 project built on Solana, a blockchain platform popular among crypto-game developers and NFT peddlers. Moreover, the Flappy Bird Foundation described its upcoming title as "the world's first open-source, community-owned Web 2 and Web 3 game," a description that will sound all too familiar to those who've previously come across crypto-related scams. Please note that this and all the other hidden pages were promptly disabled in response to the backlash and now all lead to 404s.
Biniwale's report goes on to showcase several early builds of the new Flappy Bird, featuring playable levels, a main menu, and, unsurprisingly, multiple references to cryptocurrency wallets:
On top of that, the developer uncovered that 1208 Productions, a company involved in various crypto and NFT-related projects, is most likely behind the new Flappy Bird game, based on information Biniwale found in the API:
In addition to the Flappy Bird Foundation's NFT schemes, it was revealed that the original game's developer, Dong Nguyen, never sold the trademark or received any money from the deal. According to the available court data, Nguyen had simply abandoned the trademark, which was later claimed for free by Gametech Holdings, legally allowing them to label their project as the "official" Flappy Bird.
To top it all off, Dong Nguyen himself resurfaced on Twitter after years of inactivity to confirm that he never sold the trademark, has no connection to "the official Flappy Bird®", and, in fact, dislikes crypto.
At the moment, the new Flappy Bird's developers remain silent, ignoring the gaming community's backlash and numerous Community Notes they received on Twitter. With evidence as solid as Varun Biniwale's and no comments from the FBF, it seems almost certain that the plans to make Flappy Bird Reborn a crypto game were not abandoned but simply kept hidden until the right moment, likely to be revealed only after the game's official release.
Given the overwhelmingly negative sentiment in the gaming community towards all things Web3, NFT, and crypto-games, it seems that even if the new Flappy Bird were to release – something I doubt given their response to the backlash – it would likely be dead on arrival and dismissed as yet another shady attempt by "crypto bros" to scam people out of their hard-earned money.
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