Swing Copters, before it got nerfed. Gears Studio/Screenshot: WIRED
Swing Copters is not the mobile game we wanted, but it is the mobile game we deserve.
Released last week by Dong Nguyen, Swing Copters is everything that fans loved to hate about his controversial breakout success Flappy Bird . Its Super Mario aesthetic hides a brutally difficult gameplay mechanic whose siren song is so compelling that players will continue to smash themselves against its rocks anyway.
Playing it last week, I was struck by the apparent revelation that Dong Nguyen had embraced the darkness that had once threatened to destroy him. Swing Copters must be, I imagined, Nguyen’s remorseless revenge on a cruel world, enacted with googly eyeballs.
It wasn’t much different than Flappy Bird, in theory. You manipulate a flying character through a series of gates. Score one point per gate passed; die if you collide with anything.
To begin playing Swing Copters is to be utterly confused. You tap to start the game. Nothing happens. Your little guy’s propeller hat starts spinning up. The second he launches into the air, he immediately goes veering off to the right, smashes into the invisible wall at the screen’s edge before even reaching the first gate. Game over: Your score is zero.
Sure, maybe this happened to you the first time you played Flappy Bird, too. The difference with Swing Copters is that even after you die a couple of times, you still may have absolutely no idea what it is you’re supposed to do to not die. Tapping the screen reverses your hapless propeller thing’s flight direction, but he’s going so fast that all you do is slam into the other side of the screen.
What does this even mean? Gears Studio
At this point, you begin to think: Am I just not getting this? Is there something else I should be doing? Are there tilt controls that adjust velocity? Does it matter what part of the screen I tap?
(Spoilers below.)
No, you just tap wherever. Each tap changes the horizontal direction of Eyeball Guy’s flight, but his rocket speed and monster truck momentum make it nigh-on impossible to even get aligned with the first gate—let alone negotiate through the swinging hammers that guard it.
Eventually, after many a game, after questioning why you are even doing this when you could just be watching the Simpsons marathon, you luck out and fly through a gate without hitting it. In all of your excitement at finally scoring a single point, you instantly die. Your score is one. You take a screenshot because this may never happen again.
If you’re like me, maybe you have some friends playing Swing Copters, too. You console yourself by noting that their scores, also, are in the low single digits. In an over-stimulated age where games give you 10 million points just for pressing Start, the fact that Swing Copters makes you fight brutally for each measly point is oddly refreshing.
Then, Swing Copters disappears.
No, it wasn’t pulled off the App Store with great fanfare, in the way that Dong Nguyen killed his big hit when the internet abuse became too much to bear. Instead, what happened was that Nguyen—who I now, in my mind, was beginning to admire greatly as an evil genius—released an update that considerably softened the game mechanics. Friends began reporting ridiculous scores as high as 10. That seemed just so unreasonable.
I immediately became very protective of my original, unadulterated download of Swing Copters. I was getting pretty good at it! I had scored five! Five! Was this to mean nothing? I had been so comforted by the idea of Swing Copters-as-elaborate-revenge-plot. Now Nguyen was dialing it back?
Loathe to download the update on my phone and permanently overwrite the Swing Copters I was used to, I used my wife’s phone to play the new version (she does not share my admiration for the game). I was generally relieved to find that while, yes, I did double my high score instantly (the 10 felt cheap and tawdry), it’s still a challenging game. It’s just not so uncompromisingly brutal about it.
Still, I shall not update my Swing Copters, as long as I can help it. It is a tiny protest. As a society we have largely traded in our Nintendo DS cartridges for iOS downloads, but in doing so we have signed on to a system in which games are as evanescent as cherry blossoms. At any time, they might be altered considerably with no simple (or entirely legal) method of playing them again as they were, or abruptly disappeared down the memory hole without notice.
It's hard to get used to the idea of games as single-serving disposable goods, as Dixie cups in place of fine china.
Then again, I'm already starting to forget about Swing Copters.
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