Flappy Bird clones appear: wanna switch a bird for a flying pig?

by Unknown at 1:50 PM
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Flappy Bird has been out for less than a week on Android and it has already gone viral with over ten million downloads. The premise is simple: tap to flap your bird's wings and pass endless pipe obstacles. That's it. But it's not easy. The game's instantaneous popularity has already spawned a few clones, from substituting the bird for a flying pig to a fake score screen that asks users to pay for it: with the word ''fake'' in the app's title! Check out the best clones we've seen.

Flappy Bird has become so instaneously popular the clones are appearing already. / © .GEARS Studios Clumsy Bird

The first entrant is not even really a clone, because Clumsy Bird came out on Android the day before Flappy Bird (which was, of course, already on iOS), and it brings much better graphics than the Flappy Bird ''original''. It's kind of an Angry Birds-meets-Flappy Bird mashup. In this hybrid, dragons have stolen the Clumsy Bird's eggs and then it's all Flappy Bird gameplay as you manouver between tree trunks to recover the eggs. I'll give them points for Frankensteining the two most popular bird games on Android right now.

Angry Birds storyline meets Flappy Bird gameplay in Clumsy Birds. / © Candy Mobile Icon

Clumsy Bird INSTALL Tappy Bird

The next clone is a basic reproduction of Flappy Bird called Tappy Bird by a Google ''Top Developer'' by the name of Androidslide, the dev responsible for Camera Zoom FX. It looks rushed and, incredibly, seems to have even worse graphics than the original Flappy Bird. Not that the original Flappy Bird was original anyway – I seem to remember those pipes from somewhere else and there's something very Helicopter-like about it too. Still, fans of the ''original'' seem a bit upset that Flappy Bird has been cloned so directly.

Not much to say here: Tappy Bird is a slightly worse version of Flappy Bird. / © Androidslide Icon

Tappy Bird INSTALL Fake Flappy Bird

I wonder how those fans feel about being asked to pay for a clone of Flappy Bird's score screen called Fake Flappy Bird. It seems pretty obvious that it's a waste of money to most, but several hundred users have actually paid to install an app with the very word ''fake'' in the title - just to trick your friends into thinking you scored 722 points. I'd like to say ''bad developer!'' but there's a market for everything. This app is not actually a game though, so be warned.

Yeah...I think if you still pay for this app you deserve to lose your money. / © Bpma TechFlappy Tappy

If the straight-up cloning of Flappy Bird isn't enough to warrant a chuckle from you then this last one surely will: how about we substitute the pixelated bird with lips for a pig's head with ear-wings? Sure, why not! In all fairness, at least this clone has swapped out the Super Mario pipes for ''cliffs'' and added an extra layer of humor to it. I imagine the original developers that ported Flappy Bird to Android, GEARS Studio, must have said ''when pigs fly'' at least once during the development of the game, so this seems kind of fitting, and is actually kinda fun.