Some people are so strange with things like this[1]. It's as if anything that a major company would dare put their name near must be super polished and very serious. It's fun to ship. I clicked the same link as you. I saw the same domain name as you. I walked in assuming it'd be something pretty neat. I saw faux-8-bit and said, "golly I bet someone had fun for a day or so". I got over it and played the game a half dozen times noting the annoying GC pauses and slightly-off collision detection. Had fun, moved on.

Sometimes companies are chill about non-core stuff having their name on it and will let an individual who created a cute game during a hackathon show it off. "Is this video streaming related? No? Okay, just make sure it's not offensive and there's no way anyone could take it too seriously."

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12849828

It has that fun Hackathon / side-project feel, that someone probably noticed and said "Hey, if you polish it up, we can host it for public use, because why not?".

For real, anyone remember flappy bird? This is pretty similar and flapper bird made a LOT of people happy.

> flapp[y] bird made a LOT of people happy.

Dong Nguyen, the creater of Flappy Bird thinks different about this topic - this is also the reason why he took the game down for the app stores:

'"Flappy Bird was designed to play in a few minutes when you are relaxed," the developer said "But it happened to become an addictive product. I think it has become a problem. To solve that problem, it’s best to take down Flappy Bird. It’s gone forever."'

> http://compethics.samething.net/2014/02/20/flappy-bird-and-u...

> http://bgr.com/2014/02/11/why-flappy-bird-was-removed/

He later put it back up though, didn't he?

> He later put it back up though, didn't he?

At least it is not on Google Play anymore:

> https://play.google.com/store/search?q=Flappy+bird&c=apps

and by

> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Flappy_Bird&oldid...

it is also not on Apple's app store anymore. What happened is "As Nguyen had promised, August 2014 saw a revised version of Flappy Bird, called Flappy Birds Family, released exclusively through the Amazon Appstore for the Amazon Fire TV platform."

You are right, it was not put back up by the original developer. I guess I just conflated it with the subsequent clones because by the time I heard of the game it had already been removed but then later I was able to play "the game" still.

I gotta say though, Flappy Bird is a higher quality game than this. Even though it was graphics copied from Nintendo and an even simpler mechanic, the physics and hit detection make a huge difference.

Could be sign of times to come; netflix launching a gameflix.

What about this game possibly leads you to think that they're launching a gameflix? It's all know characters from known netflix properties. After you die it links you to the show. I think you're seeing something that isn't there.

I mentioned "could be" and agreed it might not exist. But keeping the viewer engaged during the lull of what to view next , games seem to be an obvious choice. This is something which Netflix should and can do .