In February 2014, a 28-year-old programmer in Vietnam was earning an estimated $50,000 a day from banner ads in a game he built in two or three days. Then Dong Nguyen tweeted that he could not take it anymore and pulled Flappy Bird from every app store. This episode reconstructs his life, from learning to code by studying Super Mario Bros. and interning at Punch Entertainment at 19, to founding .GEARS with a minimalist philosophy that mobile games should be built for people always on the move.

We explain how a recycled bird sprite from a cancelled platformer, ping-pong-ball physics and deliberately tightened pipe gaps produced a loop of intermittent reinforcement, how a PewDiePie video turned a months-old dead launch into the number one free app in the US, UK and China, and how plagiarism accusations involving Mario pipes and the French gam ...