The early days of Apple’s App Store were marked by rapid and unregulated growth, featuring both good and bad apps, and where a finely crafted game could easily get recommended.
Before this, Mei Fang’s Flappy Bird had been featured on the App Store twice, and prior to the third time, it had already accumulated over 10,000 downloads.
When Flappy Bird was featured for the third time in the App Store, it happened to coincide with two major events.
The first event was the official release of iPhone 4, a model that, compared to its enhanced version 4S, could not be considered a highly successful masterpiece. It was also heavily criticized due to the Antennagate incident.
However, it brought iPhone’s sales close to 40 million units, and it truly opened the door to the Chinese market, leading countless people in China to become enthusiastic about the “exchange a kidney for a set of three iPhones” meme.
The second event was the official surpassing of Yahoo by the well-known social media platform Facebook in terms of website traffic, making it the second-largest website in America, only after Google.
The success of Facebook also demonstrated the immense strength and future prospects of social media websites, showing that people’s use of the internet had evolved from a mere tool to a necessity in life.
These two events may seem unrelated, but in reality, they triggered a series of chain reactions, ultimately leading to one result:
Flappy Bird, also known as Clumsy Bird, skyrocketed to fame overnight after being featured for the third time on App Store, claiming the top spot on the North American free download chart.
The success of Flappy Bird was not due to its gameplay being exceptionally rich or entertaining, but rather because it was a game miracle born from social networking.
Initially, some early players downloaded the game out of boredom.
At first, the spread was limited to the players’ rants, who were perhaps infuriated by dying over and over again or exhilarated by surpassing their own high scores. In any case, they would share and post their experiences and records on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or other emerging social media platforms.
Later on, as their social media posts spread, more and more players flocked to the game.
Compared to its earlier versions, Mei Fang paid more attention to the social interaction experience when designing version 1.0. In the game, players could interact with their social media friends by linking their Facebook accounts, and there would be weekly leaderboards of them and their social media friends.
Young players loved to share, record, compete, and review. When they saw their friends surpassing them, they would desperately continue playing, which, of course, meant continuous ad revenue for Mei Fang.
There were also those who noticed that their social media friends who had never played games before appeared on the game leaderboards. Simply out of curiosity about the shared game, these internet-savvy users successfully became part of Flappy Bird’s gaming community.
Many people began to write reviews and articles for Flappy Bird, analyzing its success. However, some pointed out that this game did not deserve to be called a true game and was a stain on the Ninth Art.
Of course, Lin Youxi was now inevitably aware of some of the situation, but Mei Fang had not revealed too much information to her.
Lin Youxi was an introverted person, and she herself didn’t ask much about these things. Mei Fang trusted her.
So, during the summer vacation after finishing the second year of middle school, while diligently reviewing and preparing for the entrance exam of Jiangcheng NOHS, Mei Fang secretly became a millionaire with his two childhood sweethearts by his side.
After upgrading the bandwidth of C Site, Mei Fang started looking for some developers to maintain the website.
Although they were still young, Mei Fang and Lin Youxi were not ordinary when it came to Golang and C# programming languages. However, they couldn’t solely rely on themselves for website operation and maintenance.
Taking advantage of the summer vacation, Mei Fang discovered some talented programmers and artists among the senior members of C Site. He hoped they could help with some tasks on a part-time basis.
C Site was a passion-driven website. The programmers themselves understood this very well. These anime enthusiasts even proposed to work for Mei Fang, also known as 【Mountain Has Forest】, for free. Mei Fang firmly refused and even offered them a monthly salary of 1,000 to 2,000 yuan.
Since then, rumors of 【Mountain Has Forest】 being a rich young lady spread, and Mei Fang even received comments and private messages such as internet slang that he had only seen during the later years of his previous life, which made him suspect that these people might have also traveled through time.
Although there was no formal contract, these members who were contributing to the website worked harder than some formal employees Mei Fang had encountered before. There were daily discussions in their group chat, and their modifications to the site fully met Mei Fang and Lin Youxi’s expectations.
As a result, C Site quickly grew under the joint efforts of these early enthusiasts.
After their summer vacation in 2010, then winter vacation, time flew by, and it was now spring of 2011. The three of them were working hard towards their goals, and their relationship remained very close.
Xia Yuan, who had been tormented by physics for days, had now fully returned to her smiling self, even becoming a bit too active.
Active to the point of not feeling ashamed to engage in some overly daring physical contact.
Fortunately, our Mei Fang was the chosen one. With his mature rationality and adept maneuvering skills, he managed to get through unscathed in the end.
Many visions were now being arranged and planned, and the day to test the results was fast approaching.
In the sunny month of March, Mei Fang, Xia Yuan, and Lin Youxi had made thorough preparations. Tomorrow, they would embark on a journey to Jiangcheng for the special county student entrance examination——
Along with their respective parents.