Several years have passed since it was released Flappy bird and yet this particular video game that so many passions aroused for various reasons is still in the news. Of course, now it is not because it has returned or added any important news but because it is a clone that runs on a Raspberry Pi together with the implementation of an AI. So you won’t have to worry and leave the machine to play alone.
Flappy Bird, an eternal success
The reasons why a video game is successful or not can be very strange, so much so that sometimes there are those who do not share what happened. Of course, if there is a case that still attracts a lot of attention to this day, it is that of Flappy bird.
The game developed by Dong Nguyen and released in 2013 quickly turned into outright madness. Everyone was talking about him and with good reason, hence it quickly went viral. What was it exactly and what made it special?
Well let’s see, Flappy Bird can easily be summed up as a videogame where you must control the flight of a bird so that it passes between pipes. These have a different separation and also a different height, so it is not a matter of maintaining a constant rhythm and height, you must adjust each movement well to achieve the goal of passing between obstacles.
That mechanic, which seemed simple a priori, was really the basis of its success. Because it was not easy, on the contrary, many ended up despairing and that caused them to criticize its creator a lot, which ended up causing him to withdraw it from the store. A very curious decision, because the game had brought him a significant income in a few days.
However, despite the emptiness left by the original game, it didn’t take long for other clones to come out. Some with higher or lower quality.
A Raspberry Pi playing Flappy Bird
If you have never played Flappy Bird you will know that despite looking simple it is not. Much less if you play it on a mobile, where you have to hit the screen so that the bird jumps in the air to get safely as far as possible.
However, there are those who have not only managed to implement a system based on artificial intelligence (Evolving Neural Networks through Augmenting Topologies or NEAT) that allows to analyze the movements that this little bird must follow to go through each and every one of the pipes that appear on the screen, also execute them automatically and that for this only a Raspberry Pi is needed working.
Through a Flappy Bird clone plus this code, available to all interested parties through GitHub, you will be able to build your own Raspberry Pi games with which to run the game and see how the AI plays. While you will fall hypnotized by those little hops of the bird and how it passes between the pipes thinking that one of them hits it yes or yes, but it will not happen. Because This Raspberry Pi plays Flappy Bird better than you and that most of all of us.
