I immediately thought it was that scene when I saw the screenshot, such a bittersweet moment.

Just started it this morning and having fun so far, now I just need someone to make a game in the spirit of Sly Cooper!

Unfortunately multiple sources seem to agree Dong Nguyen has no involvement, which is consistent with the way he originally shut down Flappy Bird due to people spending too much time on it :(

"The Flappy Bird Foundation said it has acquired the official Flappy Bird trademark from Gametech Holdings LLC, a U.S. company that appears to have wrestled the trademark from Nguyen, as well as the rights for the original game and character from Piou Piou vs. Cactus, the mobile game that supposedly originally inspired the Flappy Bird character."

https://www.ign.com/articles/10-years-after-it-was-pulled-offline-viral-mobile-game-flappy-bird-is-coming-back

And the trademarks were sleazily grabbed from the original creator :/

It's almost baffling to think we still have mysteries like this so long after the game's (apparently aborted) release, but it's really cool to read along with the investigation!

"Obligatory fuck the HDMI forum and the HDMI spec"

Amen to that

It probably would've been useful to include the list of actual games:

"The three games included are: The Wing of Madoola, Firework Thrower Kantaro’s 53 Stations of the Tokaido and Ripple Island."

I encountered that a few times growing up too, I'll never forget the ravenous way they murdered every marble they saw without a hint of concern for the devastated marble families left behind .

It's an especially fun claim in light of events like the Prague Spring and re-invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Soviets formed a military alliance whose only military action was to actually invade and crush one of its own members!

Even assuming they did make development decisions to benefit advertising partners, how on earth would choosing not to optimize performance actually benefit them?

Which is terribly underperforming when you consider how many more dogs exist in proximity to humans compared to hippos. If a prankster wizard suddenly conjured a few million hippos into homes around the world you can bet they wouldn't settle for merely snuffing out 50x-70x more humans. On the upside, they'd definitely chomp a lot of people we don't like too

Ah understood!