Flappy Bird Creator Returns With New Game Swing Copters
Time to clear your schedule: Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen has officially released his much-anticipated new game, Swing Copters, for iOS and Android devices, The Next Web reports.
The game shares Flappy Bird’s old-school aesthetic, and boasts an equally simple premise: Guide a small helicopter-man through a series of gates outfitted with swinging hammers. Though, as Touch Arcade’s gameplay trailer shows, actual execution — like Flappy Bird — is maddening. The copter-man moves side to side on his own, but users can change his direction by tapping their phones, though this becomes harder once he starts moving one way or the other. Users can unlock new characters by earning four medals.
Swing Copters comes several months after the sudden, immense success of Flappy Bird caused Nguyen to yank the game from app stores everywhere and retreat from the public eye. As Rolling Stone learned, Nguyen’s decision wasn’t just a response to increased attention and fierce criticism that he ripped off early Nintendo art, but e-mails he received from parents who said his game was distracting their kids (and sometimes causing them to break their phones), as well as workers who said they had lost their jobs because of it.
A month after pulling Flappy Bird, Nguyen told fans in a Twitter Q&A that he was working on a new version of the game, a sentiment he echoed to CNBC in May, where he added the update would be multiplayer and “less addictive.” While Nguyen said the new version would be available in August, a new iteration of Flappy Bird has yet to arrive.