Angry Birds

‘Angry Birds is the first waste of 75 millions people's time that can be accurately quantified. Every day, users spend 200 million minutes -- 16 years every hour -- playing the mobile game.’

The first time I have heard about Angry Birds, was on my first day when I purchased smartphone and looked at the market for new applications and games. Right now I hear about Angry Birds everywhere!

A bit of a history

Angry Birds is a Finnish strategy puzzle mobile game developed by Finnish computer game developer Rovio Mobile. First they had to save a company in crisis: at the beginning of 2009, Rovio was close to bankruptcy. Then they had to create the perfect game, do every other little thing exactly right, and keep on doing it. There had been developed 51 titles before Angry Birds.

The development of Angry Birds was started in March 2009. After the successful creation of the development team of Rovio, they released the game in December 2009 and the next is history. Angry Birds became the number one game app in Finland. It took US and UK by storm where Apple’s participation was the key to make it all happen. 

How characters were developed

When the concept of Angry Birds was developed, the staff realized the birds needed an enemy. At the time, the "swine flu" epidemic was in the news, so the staff made the birds' enemies pigs.

And now

Angry Birds has been praised for its successful combination of addictive gameplay, comical style, and low price. Its popularity led to versions of Angry Birds being created for personal computers and gaming consoles, a market for merchandise featuring its characters and even long-term plans for a feature film or television series. With a combined 500 million downloads across all platforms and including both regular and special editions, the game has been called "one of the most mainstream games out right now", "one of the great runaway hits of 2010", and "the largest mobile app success the world has seen so far".

It is funny how much people can get fanatic about something. It is like Harry Potter concept – it is now branded everywhere, hopefully it will not be as annoying. Will Angry Birds one day become like Disney 2.0? Or people will forget about then in 5 years? There is no answer to that. But looking at the recent ‘NASA announcement’ – Angry Birds are getting only more and more popular.