For people who grew up with the Nintendo family computer, no sound can be more recognizable as the melodious, tinny chime of gold coins being collected by a plucky plumber named (Super) Mario.

So, when I heard that familiar chime coming out of my brother’s phone, I thought, “Whoa, is Mario officially on iOS now?”

Except that the chimes came few and far between, accompanied by deep sounds that went “whoosh, whoosh, whoosh …”

And then, splat! Followed by an angry string of expletives and couch punching from my brother.

If you’ve been punching or kicking couches, beds, or tables and screaming the last few days, then you must have Flappy Bird on your phone.

Latest viral game

The app is the latest viral game du jour, eliciting virulent reactions from players around the world. At first glance, the game looks like a Super Mario knockoff, complete with the static 8-bit background, green pipes, and a side view of a bird with a beak that’s had one collagen injection too many. In fact, from the side, Flappy Bird looks like a small, puffy fish.

The game’s premise is ridiculously simple. Just tap the screen continuously to control the bird; your objective is to weave in and out of the gaps in between the pipes without hitting anything in between. Once the bird comes into contact with anything, the game is over, you lose. Easy, right?

Wrong.

In Candy Crush, the amount of time you waste on it will bear fruit by way of level progression. With Flappy Bird, you can spend a full 24 hours playing it and it’ll be a damn achievement to get a high score of 24. Getting a score of 100 doesn’t mean you’re great at the game; it just means you got lucky.

We’ve been playing it for a week, and we’ve gotten 20 so far. Our constant score per game is 4 or 5. Sometimes we don’t even make it past the first pipe. This game does not get you hooked by throwing you a bone of achievement every now and then; instead, it’ll make you so angry that all you want to do is get that bird safely through pipes … and then stomp on the bird repeatedly—but not before you get a score higher than 10.

My brother, who sneakily plays it while at work, has scored 111, and he calls it the greatest achievement of his life.

In the week since it went viral (it’s the top free download on the AppStore and Google Play), many Flappy Bird tweets, posts, Vines, and memes have cropped up, mostly photos of broken phones supposedly wrecked after quitting Flappy Bird.

Before Flappy Bird, we had no idea that so much rage and frustration could well up in the human body, especially over a deceptively simple game.

If you’re extremely competitive, stay away from this game. It will wreck your life. It’ll make your self-esteem crash and burn like a yellow, flappy bird.