Helicopter from Ebaumsworld "copied" it too. There are approximately millions copies of 2D-something-flies-and-avoids-obstacles games. First one was created approximately 20 years ago or sooner.
Almost all of them are boring and few of them are able to keep players interested for more then 10 seconds.
Transforming simple idea almost everybody else had into something that keeps players engaged counts as achievement too.
Given madness it caused in minds of some people, I'm fine with calling it simple evil genius.
Which was itself a copy of an older game called SFCave, which was a copy of some much older game I can't remember...
I once wrote a similar game featuring a penguin swimming through an underwater cave (http://reggaeperxics.com/cave.html), and I recall I managed to discover the story of the original game, but for the life of me I can't seem to find it anywhere on the Internet now!
The interesting thing about flappy bird is not the gameplay.
The interesting this is how it was a sleeper hit. Sitting hitting in the app store in May until it completely exploded in February.
The interesting thing is how people shared and cared about the score, and had the ability to that on a larger scale. Even if you did care about your score in the helicopter game, you couldn't easily tweet about it, and as the popularity of the helicopter game rises, it's not going to be picked up by news outlets.
The thing about anything that goes "viral" is that they don't need to be very good. And I think it's folly to look too deeply at their mechanics. It's a simple little game, and it's a game that's not at all the first of its kind. It just happened to somehow get the attention of someone who could bring it to the attention of a bunch of people, and they brought it to the attention of many more, and all of a sudden it became cool, for a little while. But with the reach of the media, when something is cool, it doesn't mean your whole class is playing it any more. It means millions of people around the world are. That said, you have to compete with a lot more to get that focus.
Had the author not pulled the game, in a few weeks it would have died off anyways. But the game has got a lot of popularity from people who simply want to duplicate its success. People care less about playing the game now, (it's not a great game, it's interesting for a few weeks) and what they are really interested in is how to make 50k per day by building a shitty game.
