This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at PS Berks chapter.
Dong Nguyen committed suicide shortly after removing his game Flappy Bird from the game markets. Or not…
The highly addictive and infuriating game of Flappy Bird has been off the market for a few days. Although fans of the game who downloaded it prior to its deletion are still able to play it, any prospective game players have lost their opportunity to tap their screens menacingly and watch their bird slam into green mario-look-alike tunnels.
Nguyen announced on Twitter on February 8th, “I am sorry ‘Flappy Bird’ users, 22 hours from now, I will take ‘Flappy Bird’ down. I cannot take this anymore.”
However, this statement was later misconstrued as a suicide notice. Several online newspapers made the horrible mistake of saying that Nguyen committed suicide shortly after removing Flappy Bird for the game market.
The story goes as follows: After Nguyen’s initial tweet of the final ‘game over’ for Flappy Bird, a few crazed fans responded to his twitter with death threats. Many fans even claimed that they were going to commit suicide themselves if Nguyen refused to change his mind.
Seeing as that Nguyen couldn’t withhold the happiness of his fans or himself, he “decided” to kill himself. Officials claimed that Nguyen was found dead in his apartment in San Francisco after shooting himself.
Sounds like a great story; however, Nguyen doesn’t live in San Francisco, he lives in Vietnam, which is seems like an understandable mistake.
Looks like only Flappy Bird’s life has ended — not Nguyens, lucky for him. But, in the words of Nguyen, “…I still make games.”