Digital game developer who doesn't want to be rich: Who is Dong Nguyen?

Vietnamese entrepreneur Dong Nguyen, who managed to become the legend of gamers but mostly game developers, became famous for deleting the Flappy Bird game from the App Store, which earned 50 thousand dollars a day, even more than Zuckerbeg. While everyone thought the mafia kidnapped him, Nguyen's Twitter post clarified the situation. On February 9, 2014, he wrote on his Twitter account, "Sorry Flappy Bird users. I'll be deleting 'Flappy Bird' in 22 hours. I can't stand this anymore."

Flappy Bird is a mobile game developed by Vietnamese video game artist and programmer Dong Nguyen, under his game development company Gears. The game is a side-scroller where the player controls a bird, attempting to fly between columns of green pipes without hitting them.

The message was retweeted more than 145,000 times by audiences who didn't think it was likely. Why wouldn't a person want such a big jackpot? But the next evening, at midnight, the story came to an end. Nguyen did as he was told and removed Flappy Bird from the AppStore. So why did he decide to slaughter the goose that lays the golden egg? Saying that he did not want to be rich, Nguyen continued to live with his family. Following the incident in 2014, Dong Nguyen agreed to share his entire life with the Rolling Stone publication, two weeks after the Flappy game was removed. "I was doing something fun to share with other people. I couldn't have predicted the success of Floppy Bird," he explained with the help of a translator. Growing up in Van Phuc, a silk-making village outside of Hanoi, Nguyen never dreamed of becoming a world-renowned game designer. His father owned a hardware store, his mother worked for the government, they could hardly even afford Nintendo. Astonished at the power of controlling a character on screen, Nguyen spent his free time obsessively playing Super Mario Bros.

CUT THE GOLDEN LAYERS OF CHICKEN

By the age of 16, Nguyen had learned to code his own computer chess game. Three years later, while studying computer science at a university in Hanoi, he entered the top 20 in a programming competition and interned at Punch Entertainment, which was one of Hanoi's leading gaming companies at the time and made mobile phone games. Son Bui Truong, Nguyen's former boss, says the young programmer stands out for his speed, skills, and independent streak.

In May 2013, Dong Nguyen uploaded a new game to the iOS App Store. It was just one of hundreds of apps added to Apple's iTunes marketplace every day. Nguyen created a simple game where the player controls a funny looking bird by touching the screen. The interest in the free download game called Flappy Bird would increase exponentially. Flappy Bird topped the charts months after its release and attracted even more players. Millions of people were downloading Flappy Bird. Nguyen was making $50,000 a day from pop-up ads appearing during the game. The constant and tedious messages, insults, requests for interviews and even death threats overwhelmed the child prodigy. Nguyen has released Flappy Bird from the App Store. Like the little bird he had created, he briefly soared and descended hard.

https://twitter.com/dongatory