Dong Nguyen

Dong Nguyen is a Vietnamese game developer from the Hanoi area and the creator of Flappy Bird, one of the most famous viral mobile games ever made. He started coding his own games at 16 and, while studying programming at university, landed an internship at the mobile game company Punch Entertainment. He later released simple, hard mobile games under his own small studio, .GEARS.

Nguyen made Flappy Bird in just a few days, reusing a bird character he had designed for an abandoned platformer, and released it on iOS in May 2013. It went largely unnoticed until a surge of attention in early 2014, when it topped the US and Chinese free app charts and became the most downloaded App Store app of January 2014. At its peak Nguyen told The Verge the game was earning around $50,000 a day from in-app advertising, alongside chart success for his other games Super Ball Juggling and Shuriken Block.

In February 2014 he announced on X that he would remove Flappy Bird, and took it down from the App Store and Google Play two days later, explaining that its addictiveness and the sudden fame had upended his simple life. He continued making games, including Swing Copters (2014) and Flappy Birds Family for Amazon Fire TV (2014). When an unrelated company relaunched a Flappy Bird game in 2024 after acquiring a lapsed trademark, Nguyen stated he had no involvement and had not sold any rights.