The classic mobile game Flappy Bird made a comeback, but its popularity was immediately destroyed by what appeared to be just a vehicle for blockchain nonsense, with no involvement from its original creator

The classic mobile game Flappy Bird is making a comeback this week, but not in the way you might think.

I’m not going to ask you if you remember Flappy Bird, because of course you do. Everyone does. It was a really good mobile game that was all the rage about a decade ago in a way that mobile games can’t be today, eventually leading to its creator Dong Nguyen pulling it from the App Store entirely due to its popularity and fears of player addiction. Earlier this week, a surprise announcement revealed that Flappy Bird would be returning, with a push led by a group called the Flappy Bird Foundation.

The team claims to be a “new team of passionate fans dedicated to sharing this game with the world” (via IGN), and that this new version of the game will have new modes, new characters, and massive multiplayer challenges. Kek, the developer behind the game Piou Piou, which Flappy Bird may or may not have ripped off, was also involved, but it’s worth noting that Flappy Bird’s creator Nguyen was not involved. As it turns out, Gametech Holdings (the company that currently owns the Flappy Bird trademark) basically just treated it as abandoned, filed a lawsuit against Nguyen, and seized the trademark without paying the developer anything.

Subsequently, some users online began to notice that the Flappy Bird account followed a number of cryptocurrency and NFT accounts on Twitter (it has since seemingly unfollowed those accounts), but according to Forbes, one of the game’s ads directly mentioned Web 3.0, so yeah, you can probably expect some blockchain nonsense in Flappy Bird’s future.

In turn, following this debacle, he tweeted for the first time in seven years explicitly stating that he had nothing to do with the new version of the game, wasn’t selling anything, and pointedly stated that he didn’t support cryptocurrency. Essentially, this whole thing is a mess, and you should go to Google and play Flappy Bird on one of the many websites that recreate the game — which is a much better way to fix these issues if you need them.