and a platinum medal from forty points. Development Dong Nguyen grew up in Vạn Phúc, a village near Hanoi. He discovered video games by playing Super Mario Bros. as a child and began coding his own at age 16. At 19, while studying programming at a local university, he won an internship at Punch Entertainment, one of the few video game companies in Vietnam. While using the iPhone, he found that its most popular games such as Angry Birds were too complicated, and wanted to make a simpler game for people who are "always on the move". Flappy Bird was created and developed by Nguyen in two to three days. The bird character, Faby, was originally designed in 2012 for a cancelled platform game. The gameplay was inspired by the act of bouncing a ping pong ball against a paddle for as long as possible. Initially the game was significantly easier than it became in the final version, however Nguyen said he found this version to be boring and subsequently tightened up the difficulty. He described the business plan of a free download with in-game advertisements as "very common in the Japanese market". Nguyen believes that contemporary Western games are overly complex. His company, .Gears, describes its games as "heavily influenced by retro pixelated games in its golden age. Everything is pure, extremely hard and incredibly fun to play". Release Flappy Bird was originally released on May 24, 2013, with support for the iPhone 5. The game was subsequently updated for iOS 7 in September 2013. Although originally unsuccessful, the game received a massive influx of players after being reviewed by the Swedish YouTuber PewDiePie. In January 2014, it topped the Free Apps chart in the US and Chinese App Stores, and later that month topped the same section of the UK App Store where it was touted as "the new Angry Birds". It ended January as the most downloaded App on the App Store. The Android version of Flappy Bird was released to the Google Play store on January 30, 2014. In early 2014, Nguyen said in an interview with The Verge that the game was earning around $50,000 a day in revenue through its in-game advertising. Discontinuation On February 8, 2014, Nguyen announced on Twitter that the game would be removed from both Apple's App Store and Google Play, writing: "I am sorry 'Flappy Bird' users, 22 hours