Clipped wings: the truth behind Flappy Bird

Last April, Dong Nguyen, a quiet 28-year-old who lived with his parents in Hanoi, Vietnam, and had a day job programming location devices for taxis, spent a holiday weekend making a mobile game. He wanted it to be simple but challenging, in the spirit of the Nintendo games he grew up playing. The object was to fly a bug-eyed, big-lipped, bloated bird between a series of green vertical pipes. The quicker a player tapped the screen, the higher the bird would flap. He called it Flappy Bird.

The game went live on the iOS App Store on May 24. Instead of charging for Flappy Bird, Nguyen made it available for free and hoped to get a few hundred US dollars a month from in-game ads.

But with about 25,000 new apps going online every month, Flappy Bird was lost in the mix and seemed like a bust - until, eight months later, something crazy happened. The game went viral. By February, it was topping the charts in more than 100 countries and had been downloaded more than 50 million times. Nguyen was earning an estimated US$50,000 a day. Not even Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg became rich so fast.

Yet as Flappymania peaked, Nguyen remained a mystery. Aside from the occasional tweet, he had little to say about his incredible story. He ducked the press and refused to be photographed. He was called a fraud, a con man and a thief. Bloggers accused him of stealing art from Nintendo. Gaming site Kotaku wrote in a widely clicked headline, "Flappy Bird Is Making $50,000 A Day Off Ripped Art."

On February 9, at 2.02am Hanoi time, a message appeared on Nguyen's Twitter account. "I am sorry 'Flappy Bird' users," it read, "22 hours from now, I will take 'Flappy Bird' down. I cannot take this anymore." The message was retweeted more than 145,000 times by the disbelieving masses. How could someone who hit the online jackpot suddenly pull the plug? But when the clock struck midnight the next evening, the story came to an end. Nguyen, as promised, took Flappy Bird offline. In his wake, he left millions of jilted gamers, and one big question: who was this dude, and WTF had he done?

Two weeks after the demise of Flappy Bird, I'm taxiing past pagodas and motorbikes to the outskirts of Hanoi, a crowded, run-down metropolis filled with street vendors selling pirated goods, to meet with Nguyen, who has agreed to share with me his whole story for the first time. With the international press and local paparazzi searching for him, Nguyen has been in hiding - fleeing his parents' house to stay at a friend's apartment, where he now remains. Although dotcom millionaires have become familiar in the United States, in Vietnam's fledgling tech community they're all but unheard of. When the country's first celebrity geek, a boyish, slight guy in jeans and a grey jumper, walks hesitantly up and introduces himself, he measures his words and thoughts carefully, like placing pixels on a screen.