RedBird

Arcade · one button · no install

One bird.
One button.
A city full of pipes.

Tap, click or hit the space bar to flap. Gravity does the rest, and gravity has never once been on your side. Everything runs in this tab — nothing is uploaded, nothing is downloaded, and the whole thing still works with the Wi-Fi off.

Best run so far on this device: 0 pipes, over 0 attempts.

Red Bird is a canvas game: a red bird flaps between gaps in a run of tall crimson pipes over a city skyline. Your browser does not support the canvas element, so the game cannot be drawn here.

Ready

Red Bird

Flap to keep the bird up. Fly through the gap. Do not touch anything.

Space / click / tap

Mode Classic
Bird Ember

The whole manual

How to play, in less time than a run lasts

  1. Flap

    Every input is the same input. Space bar, up arrow, W, a mouse click on the screen, a thumb on the glass, or the fat FLAP key under the cabinet. Each one gives the bird the same upward shove.

  2. Don't hold it

    Holding the key down does nothing after the first press — the shove is a single event, not a thrust. New players tend to mash. Mashing sends you into the ceiling of the gap. Flap late, flap once.

  3. Aim for the bottom lip

    Falling is free and flapping is expensive. Line the bird up with the lower edge of the gap and let it sink into the middle. One pipe of vertical patience is worth ten of panic.

  4. Score

    One point per pipe pair fully behind you. The ceiling is soft — you bonk it and slide along. The floor is not soft. Neither are the pipes.

Controls

Every control in Red Bird
SpaceFlap · start a run · restart after a crash
WFlap
Click / tapFlap, anywhere on the screen
P EscPause and un-pause
MMute the blips

Switching tabs pauses the run automatically. You will never lose a good bird to a notification.

Feathers you can earn

  • 10Bronze featherTen pipes. You have stopped fighting the controls.
  • 20Silver featherTwenty. You are reading the gaps ahead, not the one in front.
  • 30Gold featherThirty. Genuinely good, and rarer than people admit.
  • 50Ruby featherFifty pipes in one run. At this point you are showing off.

Four birds

Every bird is red. They are red differently.

Skins are cosmetic — the physics never change. They unlock against your best score on this device, in whichever mode you set it. Pick one and it takes effect on the very next flap.

    Beat your best score to unlock the rest of the aviary.

    Local high scores

    The table on this machine

    Ten best runs, stored in this browser and nowhere else. Clear your site data and they are gone for good. There is no global leaderboard, no account, and nothing leaves the device — a fake online ranking would be worse than none.

    The Pipes column is always the raw count. Ranking is weighted: a Gale run counts double, Drift and Classic count as they land.

    Your ten best runs
    #PipesModeBirdWhen
    No runs yet. The table fills itself the moment you crash.

    About

    Questions people actually ask

    Is this the original Flappy Bird?

    No. It is a tribute built from scratch — canvas shapes, a hand-tuned gravity curve, and a few hundred lines of JavaScript. No sprites, sounds or code from the 2013 game are used here. The idea of "one button, tall pipes, unfair difficulty" belongs to everybody now.

    Do I need to install anything?

    No. It is one HTML file, one stylesheet and two scripts. Open it from a folder, from a USB stick, from a laptop on a plane — it never asks the network for anything. That is the point.

    Where do my scores go?

    Into localStorage under a single key, in this browser, on this device. Nobody else sees them. If your browser blocks storage for local files, the game still plays perfectly — the table just resets when you reload.

    Why does Gale rank at double?

    Because the gaps are 26 pixels narrower and the world moves 45 pixels a second faster, which is roughly the difference between reacting and predicting. A Gale run of 15 is a harder afternoon than a Classic run of 25, so the table orders it as if it were 30. The Pipes column still shows what you actually flew. Drift runs rank at face value but carry an "easy" label, so nobody mistakes them for the real thing.

    Does it work on a phone?

    Yes, and it is arguably the better way to play it. The screen scales to the width of the device, touch is the primary input, and the page never scrolls out from under your thumb while a run is live.

    Can I turn the sound off?

    Press M, or use the toggle under the cabinet. The blips are square-wave tones generated by the Web Audio API at the moment they play — there are no audio files anywhere in the project.

    Built with

    HTML, CSS and JavaScript, in that order and nothing else. The bird, the pipes, the skyline and the clouds are drawn onto a 480 × 720 canvas every frame. The typography is whatever condensed face your system already has, sitting on the system UI stack. Total weight, including this sentence: well under 100 KB.