Inevitably when the Today Show makes a thing of…well, anything, it’s long past its prime. For Flappy Bird, it jumped the shark a bit too soon. A simple game with almost Mario-esque aesthetics based around a simple but incredibly complex concept – navigate a freaking bird through pipes towards the highest score possible.

It was never my cup of tea. I mean, I suck at any game that involves something that looks like it belongs in Angry Birds and requires an attention span longer than two seconds. It met neither of these criteria and honestly I’m on to other things (finishing The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, more on that in another article.)

Alarmingly, a series of tweets were released by the creator of the app. These read more like a cry for help. Dong Nguyen made apologies and declared he was removing the app from distribution. Twenty-two hours later, he made good on this threat and the free app disappeared from the App Store and Google Play.

And in moves that would likely surprise no one, the app itself started to sell for astronomical sums. One article on Kotaku stated that some entrepreneurial, if seriously misguided, spirits were selling iPhones with the game installed for $1500 dollars.

No, I’m not missing a decimal. I mean one-thousand-five-hundred dollars.

For a free app.

If you’ve got that kind of money to burn on a phone, by all means, do it and then send me some. The tweets I saw were in all caps and I was incredibly concerned for the author. They seemed more like a cry of desperation than a “I’m over this, removing the app.”

Some people can’t handle fame. Take a look at any number of celebrities. I hope the guy has a good support structure in place and is doing something for himself somewhere. If he’s building a new app, great. If he’s kicking it in front of a fireplace with the beverage of his choice, I’m also fine with that. I just don’t want to see an in memoriam over a free app.

~Myrrick