A game purporting to be an official follow up to the wildly successful (but still absent) Flappy Bird has hit the top of the free charts of the App Store, illustrating the continued demand for Dong Nguyen's runaway hit.

With Nguyen himself having recently talked up the possibility of relaunching Flappy Bird in a fresh, retooled form in an interview with Rolling Stone, the appearance of Flappy Bird: A New Season would appear to be a timely one.

As The Guardian reports, however, it appears this second crack of the whip is, in reality, just another clone.

What's in a clone?

The game itself offers no new take on Flappy Bird's intentionally simplistic gameplay -– to all intents and purposes, it's identical to the original title.

More importantly, however, the game hasn't been released via Nguyen's existing App Store account and the Twitter account being used to promote it is, likewise, a new addition.

Nevertheless, the rise of Flappy Bird: A New Season both proves that consumer want for Nguyen's game remains high, almost two months after the game was pulled from sale.

In a flap

It also raises questions about Apple's ability to keep on top of the continued flood of Flappy Bird clones onto its marketplace.

As previously detailed on PocketGamer.biz, the App Store is by no means the only marketplace to play host to clones of the game or, indeed, games claiming to stand as Flappy Bird sequels.

A quick search for Flappy Bird games on the Windows Store - hardly the most packed of app markets - brings up 179 results.

Attention has more recently been diverted to clones of puzzle game Threes, however, which co-creator Asher Vollmer recently claimed risks being "lost in the underbrush of copycats, me-toos and iterators."

"We do believe imitation is the greatest form of flattery," added Vollmer, "but ideally the imitation happens after we've had time to descend slowly from the peak - not the moment we plant the flag."

[source: The Guardian]