Flappy Bird is the Macarena of Gaming

The Macarena. You know it. You love him. Okay, probably not Love but you definitely know. If you can't immediately do the hands, hips, head, shimmy, jump dance right now, you could learn it in a minute by watching someone else do it.

I've been watching a lot of Todd in the Shadows videos lately. The YouTube video essayist (whose gimmick, as indicated by his channel name, has him reciting monologues in silhouette while sitting at the piano) has a few long-running series that he returns to time and time again. My favorite is Trainwreckords, in which Todd dissects an album so ill-advised it derailed the artist's long-term career. But Todd also does a series called One Hit Wonderland, where he looks at artists with a really big song, examines their attempts to follow it up, and questions whether or not they deserved more success.

I recently watched Todd's 2022 video on Macarena, in which he describes the song that launched a worldwide dance craze as “the biggest one-hit wonder of all time.” It earned that title, in part, because its creators were quite unable to create a viable sequel. Los Del Rio, the Spanish Andalusian duo behind the song, had been working for decades before Macarena and continued their efforts in the decades that followed, but never came close to replicating their massive success.

I wonder: does gaming have a Macarena? Is there a hit game that seems so basic as the Macarena, a game so ubiquitous that it feels like it's always existed? Were the games a success that had such massive cultural reach that anyone, at any age, from any background, knew what it was about? More importantly, is there an interactive success of this world conquest made by a developer who never got around to following it up?

Games that seem to have always existed

As one of its blocks falling into place, Tetris is the example that fits best here. There are some games that feel like, if their specific creator hadn't made them under the right circumstances, they would never have been born.

It's like basketball. Throwing a ball through a hoop is a fairly natural human need, as evidenced by the fact that indigenous Mesoamerican peoples began playing a ball game with a similar goal hundreds of years (at least) before James Naismith picked up a basket of peaches.

I actually first became aware of that game through the Dreamworks animated film The Road to El Dorado (but so can you).

The goal of Tetris is simple enough – create lines of blocks until they disappear – that it seems strange that Alexey Pajitnov invented it. It seems like, given a few more years, someone else would have made the same game. Some ideas feel like that, as if they exist in the ether and a person is blessed enough to mine them and shape them.

Games that everyone has played

The Macarena has reached everyone. In the video for Todd in the Shadows, he makes a point of including clips of random people of all ages, genders, and races doing the Macarena. He closes the video with consecutive context-free clips of random people, real and imaginary, having fun. Oprah, the Simpsons, sports mascots, the little boy Hawaiian Punch, Biz Markie, the Animaniacs – they all did it.

It was a dance that older people could do at their grandchildren's wedding and that young people could do in a disco. In this sense it reminds me a lot of Wii Sports. My dad (who is 40 years older than me) and I have similarly played the collection of motion-controlled games, and he's also gotten into other Wii golf games as well. A year or two ago, I played the sequel, Wii Sports Resort, with my in-laws. In the late 2000s and 2010s, it was common to see Wii installed in nursing homes. The Wiimote's motion controls and extremely simple button layout made it easy for everyone to access.

Games that the developers never followed up on despite conquering the world

And this is where we find the truest Macarena that gaming has ever had. In May 2013, Dong Nguyen uploaded Flappy Bird to the App Store. It was not a great success at first, which reflects the slow construction of the “Macarena”. Flappy Bird received a similar boost when, nearly a year after its release, PewDiePie uploaded a Let's Play in which he relived the experience we all had with Flappy Bird the first time we played it: dying a lot and getting pissed off as bad as it is the bird felt able to control.

Despite the title of the video “FLAPPY BIRD – DON'T PLAY THIS GAME”, everyone started playing. It enjoyed enormous popularity, but only for a short time. Nguyen began to feel guilty that the game was too addictive – which now seems strange, given that the game had no microtransactions – and withdrew it from sale. Anyone wanting to play Flappy Bird next would have to find an old phone with the game installed or play one of the many, many knockoffs floating around the digital storefronts of iOS and Android. The strangest one I found at the time was called Flappy Granny, and replaced the iconic bird with an old woman fluttering in the air.

None of these phenomena perfectly captures the scope of what the Macarena meant to the culture. Its ubiquity, its all-ages appeal, its flash-in-the-pan nature. But I think Flappy Bird comes closest to perfectly executing the moves.