Vietnamese programmer and game designer Dong Nguyen coded Flappy Bird in a weekend. He released it on 24 May 2013 as a free-to-download mobile phone app. Flappy Bird was slow to gain popularity, but thanks to its addictive game mechanic it soon became a viral sensation. Tapping the screen makes the bird flap its wings and points are scored by passing between vertical pipes.

By January 2014, Flappy Bird topped the Apple and Google Play charts with in-app advertising revenue estimated at $50,000 per day. Despite this success, Nguyen announced on 8 February 2014, via Twitter: ‘I am sorry Flappy Bird users, 22 hours from now, I will take Flappy Bird down. I cannot take this anymore’. This was Nguyen’s response to abusive Twitter messages from frustrated players and his own concerns that the game was proving too addictive. Following its removal hundreds of unofficial clones and tributes appeared online.


The game acquired by the V&A is in the Android Package File format which is a packaged, portable programme with a defined infrastructure designed for Android smart phones. Flappy Bird’s graphics and play design is linked to the modern retro trend of retrogaming culture. Retrogaming as a subculture of video gaming is the playing of video games designed prior to the mid-1990s, before the 5th generation of modern video game consoles took off with Sony’s 1994 Playstation. Games console manufacturers from this period (the mid 1970s-1990s) include Atari, Sega and Nintendo. Today this is a prevalent design trope in the culture of independent video game development, designed without the financial support of a video game publisher.

In 2013 both the Apple App Store and Google Play (the Android store) celebrated 50 billion apps downloaded each since 2008. It is in this context that the V&A is collecting its first app, closely followed by the Museum of Modern Art in New York who announced their first acquisition of a mobile phone app on 11 June 2014.