In early 2014, millions of people were playing one of the most brutally difficult mobile games ever created: Flappy Bird. Most players died within seconds, but its tap-to-fly mechanic was so addictive they kept coming back. Through social media and word of mouth, the game became a global phenomenon. Its creator, Vietnamese developer Dong Nguyen, then made an unprecedented decision. Feeling guilty about his game’s addictive design, he deleted the hit game at the height of its success.
The V&A recognised Flappy Bird as a marker of viral digital culture and acquired it through its Rapid Response Collecting programme shortly after it disappeared. At the time, it worked perfectly on any smartphone. A decade later, that’s no longer the case.
Mobile phones have evolved significantly since 2014. Flappy Bird was designed for the phones of that era, and modern devices simply won’t run it. While the museum has securely stored the digital files, actually playing the game in 2025 is less straightforward. Digital objects like mobile apps present complex preservation challenges for museums, especially those depending on technologies outside institutional control. Even when working hardware exists, apps often depend on external servers, advertising networks, or online services that have long since disappeared
I’m a second-year student on UCL’s MSc Conservation of Contemporary Art and Media course, specialising in time-based media (that means works that unfold over time, such as video installations, software art, or interactive digital works). I recently spent four months at the V&A researching preservation pathways for mobile apps.
One question emerged: if we tried to wake Flappy Bird from its slumber, could we still play it?
Defining the experience of Flappy Bird
First, I needed to identify what makes Flappy Bird distinct. What properties are essential to preserve, and what changes might be acceptable? Nguyen designed it for commuters holding train straps, with one hand free to tap on their phones. The game is almost like a performance that involves the player’s body interacting with the device. The difficulty of getting the tap exactly right compels the player to make multiple tries, starting the game again and again, while slot-machine sound effects reinforce an addictive feedback loop. Without the phone and the tap, it would be a very different game. Playing it with a mouse on a desktop would fundamentally alter the work.
Some aspects of the game are more flexible. Flappy Bird was designed to run on any of the devices available at the time, Android or iOS, budget and high-end models. Variations in screen brightness and size could be considered acceptable, but the core tapping experience is key to understanding why the game was so addictive.
Conservators routinely use mockups to test treatment methods without risking damage to the original. For my research, I tested a copy of the game’s files on different devices while the original remained safe in storage.
The time machine approach
My first experiment involved finding an old 32-bit phone, the kind of device that was standard when Flappy Bird launched. The museum had displayed Flappy Bird on Motorola Moto E phones in 2014, so I bought the same model online for £12. When it arrived, I was able to “sideload” the game, installing it without using the app store.
The game ran perfectly, and I was reminded just how fun Flappy Bird is. The tap felt right, the motion and speed behaved as expected. There was one small problem, an obvious broken link to sign into a leaderboard that no longer exists. This shows how apps often depend on external services that simply disappear.
This solution won’t last, because phone batteries degrade whether you use them or not and mobile phones were never built to last forever. Although old phones are plentiful on resale sites today, they’ll eventually become rare and unreliable.
The virtual solution
Next, I explored ways of sideloading the game onto my newer Samsung Galaxy S21, a modern 64-bit phone incompatible with the Flappy Bird app. When original hardware becomes obsolete, digital conservators can turn to emulation and virtualisation to recreate the environments software needs to run. I had no success running open-source emulators on my phone, but there are a number of virtual Android apps in the app store today that can recreate a 2014 phone environment inside a new device (like a phone inside a phone).
The game worked beautifully, running smoothly and scaling to fit the new phone’s larger screen. But there’s a catch: these commercial virtualisation apps are black boxes. We can’t see inside them, can’t control them, and they could stop being supported tomorrow. They may be effective for playing the game today, but museums need solutions that will work in the future. It might become necessary to fully rebuild the game’s code, or perhaps better tools will emerge for running old apps on new phones.
Caring for apps, preserving digital culture
Flappy Bird is the V&A’s oldest app and offers a preview of what’s coming for every app museums hold. Today, the game’s questions about phone addiction and design ethics are perhaps even more relevant than they were in 2014, as we’ve become more addicted to our phones than ever. At the moment, Flappy Bird lives. I can still hold a phone and feel the same frustration that millions of people felt in 2014. But keeping Flappy Bird alive will be an ongoing project as mobile technology inevitably evolves. The V&A’s care will ensure future audiences will understand why millions couldn’t put Flappy Bird down, and why its creator decided they should.
