Perhaps the most annoying thing about Flappy Bird, aside from it being impossible to play for very long, is that so many people did not recognize the green pipes coming from the sky or ground.

It was really disheartening, making me actually feel quite old, when I told my son that not even caped Mario could navigate those pipes.  “Why would Mario be in this game,” he asked, not taking a break from playing some glitzy game on his Wii U.  “Because the pipes are from Mario?” For a second,  I had that incredulous ‘duh’ tone that I usually receive from my cabal of offspring teenagers.

Then it hit me.  My son never played a game on the Nintendo or Super Nintendo.  He doesn’t do much gaming, but when he does, it’s usually new Legend of Zelda stuff.  Somehow in the arsenal of all this 13-year-old’s Star Trek technology, he had not seen or played Mario jumping through a 2-d scroller, with the prominent green pipes.  His Flappy Bird app on his phone was literally the first time he had seen what most of my life I had known as a warp pipe.

That said, this weekend I went to go buy a classic Nintendo and Super Nintendo from the gaming store and pulled out a pretty penny for the original Mario/Duck Hunt (they did not have the gun ) and Super Mario World.  My son and I have a pizza, coke and ‘Dad’s cruddy old games’ time set for Saturday, February 15th, 2014.  Hopefully I can restore some decency to Earth, but in a way, I owe a special thank you to Flappy Bird.  I played the game for all of 13 seconds, at the behest of my employees who mandated that I ‘really have to check this game out and play it.’

I’ve never been so frustrated, but perhaps that is the point of the game.  My entrepreneurial side has a very sneaking suspicion that the creator of this app, a Mr. Nguyen, may have a very clever, calculated move in play where the viral popularity of this game skyrockets even more as various news outlets talk about the game, making it peak in search charts.  Once it hits its peak, the licensed game may make a reappearance and make its creator a nice, fat chunk of change.  And that is a great reward for giving a father and son here something to do and bond over on a winter’s day.  Thanks, Flappy Bird.