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."'
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.
