Code.org gave itself and millions of fans a birthday present yesterday by bringing popular Android and iOS game Flappy Bird back from the dead, this time as a coding tutorial.

Cofounder Hadi Partovi announced the new drag-and-drop tutorial yesterday in a blog post to celebrate both the site’s one-year anniversary and its crossing the 1 billion-lines-of-code-written mark since launching the Hour of Code campaign.

The Flappy Bird tutorial allows users to drag blocks of commands into a simple visual interface to code their own rules and versions of the game. A “show code” button displays the corresponding JavaScript code. There are eight puzzles to complete in the tutorial, each adding a new command such as sound effects, speed, scoring, obstacles, colors and scenes that the user needs to successfully incorporate before moving on.

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“Flappy Bird is a simple game, and using the basics of computer science, any student can create their own version with endless possibilities,” Partovi wrote. “You can make your own rules, and make your flappy game as easy or as hard as you want. You can even reverse the scoring or make it change randomly as you play.”

Flappy Bird was the most popular game in both the Apple and Google Play app stores earlier this year before creator Dong Nguyen, who reportedly made more than US$50,000 a day through in-app advertising, abruptly pulled the app from app stores in early February.

The only explanation he gave was a series of tweets on Feb. 8:

“I am sorry ‘Flappy Bird’ users, 22 hours from now, I will take ‘Flappy Bird’ down. I cannot take this anymore.

“It is not anything related to legal issues. I just cannot keep it anymore.

“I also don’t sell ‘Flappy Bird’, please don’t ask.”

The millions of heartbroken smartphone users who mourned its death can now make the game their own. Partovi threw out suggestions such as “Flappy Easter Bunny, Flappy Santa, Flappy Shark with Lasers, Flappy Fairy or Flappy Underwater Unicorn.”

“Just don’t blame us if you can’t stop flapping,” Partovi wrote.