Dong Nguyen, the creator of the Flappy Bird app that took the world by storm earlier this year, is planning to release Swing Copters, which is a spiritual sequel to the addictive and frustrating tapping game.
Swing Copters' release, marked to be on Aug. 21, comes after Nguyen and his one-man studio DotGears Studios launched Flappy Bird Family, which is a multiplayer version of the worldwide phenomenon.
Swing Copters can be thought of as a vertical Flappy Bird. Instead of a bird, players are in control of a character with a helicopter hat that flies endlessly upward. Instead of having to pass through spaces in between pipes, players navigate the character through obstacles such as swinging hammers. Similar to the tapping gameplay of Flappy Bird, players tap on their screen to which direction the character will fly.
Players are challenged to reach as high as they can before their character is hit by an obstacle and sent falling to the ground.
By its description, the game sounds like a very simple one to play. However, that is the same reaction that gamers had when they first heard of Flappy Bird, which turned out to be one of the most frustrating games to be ever played on smartphones.
It is because of the insane amount of difficulty, set with a backdrop of cute backgrounds and bright colors, that Flappy Bird gained its worldwide fame. Despite being launched in May 2013, it was not until February when the game became popular. Over a two-week span, Flappy Bird earned Nguyen $50,000 per day from advertising revenue.
Nguyen, however, decided to take down Flappy Bird from app stores due to the stress that it brought into his simple life in Hanoi, Vietnam. The sudden success and similarly sudden pull on its plug gave the game notoriety as one that simply grew too big, too fast.
Nguyen, after months of solitary time, looks to find similar success with Swing Copters, which will be free for download. Players can choose to pay $0.99 as a one-time fee to remove all advertisements, but like in Flappy Bird, the advertisements in Swing Copters are not at all obtrusive.
Flappy Bird spawned a wave of clones in app stores, which rode on the popularity of the app's simple yet difficult gameplay. The game might be re-published on app stores, though, as Nguyen had said in an interview with Rolling Stones that he is considering to do so.
