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The excellent Flappy Bird battle royale game is now available for everyone

 

By Gutemberg

Flappy Bird is a gaming legend and one of the most explosively popular mobile games ever made. But what if it were more like Fortnite?

That’s the idea behind Flappy Royale, a new game from developers Orta Therox and Em Lazer-Walker (with contributions from Zach Gage). It mashes together the endless flapping gameplay of Flappy Bird with the last-bird-standing style of the battle royale genre that’s all the rage these days.

Gameplay is simple, just like it was in the original game: tap on your bird to flap and dodge your way through some suspiciously Mario-esque pipes. Except the goal isn’t to survive as long as you can; it’s to survive longer than the other 99 players, all of whom you can see flapping alongside you in real time. And because it’s a battle royale game, everyone starts out together on a bus, of course. 

It’s a similar style as the recently released (and even more recently DCMA’d by Nintendo) Mario Royale, which offered similar “how long can you survive” gameplay, albeit with classic Mario stages instead of random Flappy Bird pipes.

In a twist from the regular Flappy formula, there are customization options for making your bird stand out from the flock (another thing that’s borrowed from Fortnite), along with a “Daily Trial” mode that offers a preset course that players can try up to 10 times for a spot on a worldwide leaderboard.

Until today, Flappy Royale was available on mobile as an open beta. But Therox announced earlier today that the game was out now in official form on both iOS and Android. It’s also still available on the web. 

Therox also released some fascinating stats, including that 10 million games were played during the roughly three-week beta period. During its peak, 30 games were being played simultaneously every second. And on average, 20 percent of all games didn’t even make it past the first pipe, a remarkable testament to the core Flappy Bird design and its punishing difficulty. Therox says if you make it past the third pipe in any given match, you’ve statistically bested about two thirds of the lobby.