The mobile game Flappy Bird may have gone from obscurity to No. 1 free app in Apple's App Store seemingly overnight. But with that rise to fame comes a high level of scrutiny, and many have noticed that the game bears remarkable similarities to another popular mobile, Helicopter Game.
Helicopter Game, like Flappy Bird, features low-res graphics, simple but addicting one-button gameplay and viral appeal. But unlike its avian spinoff, Helicopter Game never earned any cash for its creator.
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David McCandless created Helicopter Game in 2000. At the time, he was running the website seethru.co.uk, which was a tie-in to a BBC drama called Attachments; the show was about an Internet startup called seethru. The twist of the show, McCandless said, was that website — which he now describes a kind of "proto-BuzzFeed" — was real.
"We just did silly articles and quizzes and games," he said, one of which was Helicopter Game. McCandless and a programmer friend built the Flash-based game in a matter of days. McCandless had spent many years writing about and playing video games, so he had a "good feel" for what was addicting, he said. But it wasn't until several years later that he finally realized how much of a cult hit the game was. "It was very gradual," he said. "I never expected it to be a big craze."
I know Flappy Bird is trending, but does anyone remember the Helicopter Game? pic.twitter.com/BB9C99NzGc
— Mitchell Lapierre (@mdashlap) February 7, 2014
Since then, McCandless said he has seen many similar games use his ideas, particularly with the rise mobile gaming.
"When the App Store first came in [in 2008], somebody ripped it off, just completely ripped the whole game off, and sold it for like $2 and it was the seventh biggest selling iOS app for about three months," he recalled. "I was kind of incensed but I didn't have the funds or will to get legal on it.
According to McCandless' calculations, that ripoff game grossed close to $120,000. So he wasn't surprised when Flappy Bird, a game that felt a little too familiar, began finding great success.
*sigh* Flappy Birds - another rip of my helicopter game making a $squillion http://t.co/dnV4OlbVuI - le original: http://t.co/WXY2AM1aOp
— David McCandless (@mccandelish) February 2, 2014
Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen is currently earning $50,000 per day from the game, but he revealed on Saturday that he will be taking the game down this weekend because the criticisms were too much to handle.
"I feel annoyed I'm not earning $50,000 a day in advertising," McCandless said of Flappy Bird; he never earned a cent from Helicopter Game. "But I'm mostly annoyed my high score is only two."
But McCandless never really thought about his games in terms of money. "It never really occurred to me I could make it into a business or make it into a commercial product," he said. "I just created it because it was a cool, fun thing to do and it was fun to upload it and people liked it."
Though McCandless isn't exactly bitter about Nguyen's success — he's a successful data journalist in his own right and the author of two books and two TED talks — he did have one message for the Flappy Bird creator:
"Dong, if you want to contribute some of your vast earnings to a charity of my naming in honor of your inspiration of my game I'd be very happy with that."
For the record, his charity of choice is Ganet's Adventure School.
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