Over the weekend, the creator of the wildly popular “Flappy Bird” app called it quits, yanked the app from Apple’s iTunes and Google Play Store, and unleashed chaos.
So badly do some want their “Flappy Bird” fix that more than 60 people apparently are willing to pay thousands of dollars for an iPhone loaded with the game on eBay.
We’re not talking a gold iPhone here either. It’s a 16GB, white Sprint iPhone 5, and the bidding is up to $90,200 with 12 hours left to go. But it’s not just that one lunatic auction.
There are literally dozens of iPhone and other smartphone owners on eBay trying to hawk their handsets with that pre-installed ‘Flappy Bird’ app. Bids are starting at $50, but most are asking upwards of $500 — and four bidders for another 5s, 16GB have gotten its price up to $5,100.
Whether this is all legit or a stunt is unclear at this point. Calls to @eBay asking about validity of these bids have still not been returned hours later, and no auctions appear to have ended yet.
The demise of “Flappy Bird” was announced on Saturday by Hanoi-based creator Dong Nguyen with this Tweet: “I am sorry ‘Flappy Bird’ users, 22 hours from now, I will take ‘Flappy Bird’ down. I cannot take this anymore.”
He also tweeted that he wouldn’t be selling the app. CNET News.com reported Nguyen had been earning $50,000 each day in revenue from advertisers, after 50 million or more had uploaded “Flappy Bird”, which was released in May 2013.
For anyone who’s never played “Flappy Bird”, the object of the game is direct a flying bird, which consistently moves to the right, through gaps in pipes. Your score is tallied by how many pipes you pass through; but if you crash into one, it’s game over. Each time a player taps the screen, the bird moves upwards.
Over at Tech Crunch, Josh Constine figures that the reason Nguyen has taken down the game app is because he knows players can’t quit on their own.
This article originally appeared on MarketWatch.com.