The DeanBeat: What meme had wings at the Game Developers Conference?

The Game Developers Conference ends today after a full week of lectures, demos, parties, and drunken strolls down the streets of San Francisco. I have attended many GDC events over the years, and I spent a lot of time at this one. I was surprised that so little of the event was about console games. Instead, the meme that ran throughout the show was Flappy Bird.

Yes, the silly mobile game that captured the world’s attention in February — hitting No. 1 in the mobile app stores in a hundred countries — made a huge impression on the 22,000 or so game developers who attended the show, and many of the speakers mentioned Flappy Bird and its creator, Dong Nguyen, the lone inventor in Hanoi who made the game about flying a bird through some narrow gaps in pipes. He became a symbol of just about everything you could imagine related to games, and rumors whispered that the 28-year-old chain smoker was even surreptitiously visiting the event.