It’s Feb. 8, 2014. Deep within the celestial make-up of an alternate universe, one video game designer, Dong Nguyen, can’t bring himself to hit “Tweet” on a post announcing his decision to take down “Flappy Bird,” his aggressively admired application which sat comfortably atop the “Top Free Apps” pile on the iTunes homepage. He closed his laptop, laid his head on his pillow and repeated, “What have I done?” into the wee hours of the night.
Flash forward three days later to the halls of Staples High School Tuesday morning. A group of students sit at a table discussing the latest of problems: college, snow days and that kid in Marine Biology who stares at people. All of a sudden, a brave youth comes over to the table, pulls out his phone and boasts of his record-high score of “236” on Flappy Bird.
Silence. That is, until one student responds, “Dude, who plays Flappy Bird anymore?”
You were probably expecting this dimension to be, as Abed Nadir of the NBC show “Community” would call, “the darkest timeline.”
No, in fact, this universe is pretty much like our own.
Nguyen’s tweet may have been jaw-dropping, but, in hindsight, the man very possibly has the highest IQ on the planet.
In a world where apps fade into oblivion without dignity in a matter of days, Nguyen knew the only way he could go out on top was if he lit the fuse himself. Imagine if OMGPOP tweeted the world that they were “done” with “Draw Something.” Fathom if the creators of “Vine” threw in the towel during their prime. Maybe they would’ve gone out with the same explosion of mourning on Twitter that “Flappy Bird” received (according to hashtags.com, the hashtag “RIPflappybird” has been tweeted an average of approximately 229 times from 10:00 AM to 7:00 PM EST today).
Nguyen knew the app would die soon. He basically just threw his own funeral while he was alive to see it.
But, while the aforementioned universe may be very similar to our own, that moment of embarrassment that occurred when the boy showed off his high score has been erased from the future thanks to Nguyen. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there without smartphones who are eager to join fads like “Flappy Bird.” However, by the time they show up to that party, it has already moved to someone else’s house.
So maybe the fate of “Flappy Bird” was finalized on its first day of launch. Even in every other universe, “Flappy Bird” was bound to die off this week. “Flappy Bird,” as with most apps, was a ticking time bomb from the day it became popular. However, at least, in this universe, we had a man who understood what all apps, past and present, truly need: to just die already.
There goes the smartest man who ever was.
