The gameplay is simple and reminiscent of Copter: just tap the screen to give the flying bird a height boost. And try to avoid the pipes and the ground. Despite its simplicity, it is extremely difficult.
Flappy Bird provides examples of:
- Auto-Scrolling Level: The whole game.
- Cutscene Power to the Max: The Bird is perfectly capable of level flight in the Title Screen, but forgets the moment you press the Start Button.
- Deadly Walls: The slightest touch of a pipe or the ground is instantly fatal.
- Expy:
- The Bird looks suspiciously similar to a Cheep Cheep from Super Mario Bros., and those pipes look very familiar...
- It in turn did spawn an entire movement of clones trying to capitalize on its success, especially after the game was removed from the App Store.
- The orange version also looks suspiciously like Magikarp, another video game character notorious for being a total failure...
- Fan Sequel: Many exist, mostly capitalizing on other memes. When the game was taken down, though, indie developers released, on Flappy Jam, clones and similar games intended as homages. Some examples include:
- Maverick Bird
by Terry Cavanagh, which uses Super Hexagon-esque visuals and audio, a "dive" button, and extra shapes that pop up occasionally. - FlapMMO, which allows you to flap alongside hundreds of other player-controlled birds.
- There is also a version with the Android mascot instead of the bird and lollipops instead of pipes hidden as an Easter Egg in Android Lollipop (5.0). It is also present in Android Marshmallow (6.0) with marshmallows instead of lollipops.
- Flappy Bert. The pun was inevitable, but it is rather surprising to find that the employees of Sesame Workshop would be that badly addicted to the game.
- Goat Simulator has Flappy Goat as a Game Within a Game; you can find and play it by visiting Coffee Stain Studios' in-game offices.
- Maverick Bird
- No Plot? No Problem!
- One-Hit-Point Wonder: The eponymous Bird.
- Reality Is Unrealistic: Some players of Flappy Bird accused the game's significant difficulty on the bird having unfair physics. This article shows that the bird has a completely realistic fallspeed, and those players were used to games that use low gravity and low terminal velocity for the convenience of the player.
- Retreaux: The graphics are pixelated and have a 16-bit palette; the sound effects consist of the bird flapping, the bell when you clear a pipe, and the crash sound.
- Scoring Points
- Side View
- Super-Deformed: The Bird appears spherical and has one heck of a pair of lips.
- Updated Re-release: Flappy Birds Family, so far available only on Amazon Fire TV. It adds enemy ghosts to the game, and adds a competitive two-player mode in which the players have three lives.
- Video Game Demake: As simple a game as it is, it's very easy to port, so homebrew versions have been created for virtually every video game system, from the Atari 2600 to the Pokémon mini.
