Angry Birds’ Impact on Mobile Gaming is Still Felt 15 Years Later

Posted by By our-little-miss-is-home December 11, 2024 13 Views 11 Min Read
Angry Birds' Impact on Mobile Gaming is Still Felt 15 Years Later



15 years ago, mobile gaming was still in its relative infancy. While portable consoles had existed for decades by the late 2000s, such as the Game Boy, Nintendo DS, and the PlayStation Portable, those platforms were often still connected to home console franchises and required cartridges to play. With the advent of social media and concise, powerful technology, many companies began making phones into universal devices designed for calls as well as photography, email, videography, and gaming. It was on these early smartphones, such as the iPhone, that mobile gaming truly exploded into popularity with the release of Angry Birds in December 2009.



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Angry Birds’ Gameplay and Story Explained

Developed by the Finnish game development company Rovio Entertainment, Angry Birds was a simple yet highly addictive game. The premise of Angry Birds was that a horde of green pigs steal several eggs from a flock of birds with the intention of eating them. Enraged, the birds begin to attack the pigs, who defend themselves by building crude structures out of planks, glass, stone, and garbage. As players progress through the game, they unlock other types of birds beyond the common Red Bird, such as a speedy Yellow Bird and an exploding Black Bird. The pigs do not defend themselves and can only survive if the player fails to eliminate them all with their limited number of birds per stage.


Angry Birds’ gameplay may be its most critical feature. To attack the pigs, birds must be launched at the pigs’ structures via a slingshot. Instead of simply clicking buttons or using a joystick to attack the pigs, players have to drag their finger against the screen to pull back the sling and aim it to determine the best place for the bird to crash into the pigs. Each birds’ unique abilities will change how players aim and launch the bird with the slingshot, with the Yellow Bird being able to fly farther than the slingshot can fire and the Big Brother Bird being able to go only short distances. At times, players may gain access to the gigantic Mighty Eagle, which will take out most pigs and structures on a single stage at once if fired correctly.

The original
Angry Birds
game was Rovio’s 52nd game developed in only six years, and helped the young company avoid bankruptcy.


From the moment Angry Birds launched on iOS and Maemo devices, the app proved to be a wild success both critically and financially. Critics praised the game for its accessible controls, cute graphics, and fun, addictive gameplay. By October 2010, nearly a year after Angry Birds’ initial release, 12 million copies of the game were sold via the Apple App Store and Nokia Ovi Store. Angry Birds consistently remained at the top of app stores’ paid apps charts, which motivated Rovio to release several updates for the game for several years. This near instantaneous success led to Rovio developing numerous spinoff games of Angry Birds, such as Angry Birds Seasons and Angry Birds Rio, with the two forming the Angry Birds Trilogy alongside the original game.


Motivated by Angry Birds’ praise and financial success, Rovio quickly began developing more spinoff games to expand the growing Angry Birds franchise. This first started with Angry Birds Seasons and Rio but continued with the Facebook exclusive Angry Birds Friends, Angry Birds Space, and Bad Piggies, wherein gamers got to play as the green pigs for the first time. Meanwhile, the original Angry Birds games were ported to video games consoles such as Angry Birds Trilogy on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, Nintendo 3DS, Wii, and Wii U. Rovio even got Angry Birds to crossover with some of pop culture’s biggest franchises, including Angry Birds Star Wars and Angry Birds Transformers.

Over
Angry Birds
’ 15-year-long history, 29
Angry Birds
video games have been released with the latest,
Angry Birds Journey
, releasing in 2022.


Angry Birds’ Expansion to Other Mediums

While Rovio worked on numerous updates to the original Angry Birds and produced several spinoff games, it also worked on expanding the franchise to other mediums, beginning with the animated short movie Wreck the Halls, which aired on Nickelodeon in 2011. Since then, Angry Birds has been adapted into several animated series, including Angry Birds Toons, Angry Birds: Summer Madness, and Angry Birds Mystery Island. Development on an Angry Birds movie officially began in 2012. Speculation about a film in production had already spread by 2011, leading the web company Rooster Teeth to release the live action parody trailer Angry Birds: The Movie, garnering over 26 million views to date.


In 2016, Columbia Pictures and Rovio Entertainment finally released The Angry Birds Movie as an animated comedy film. It was the most expensive Finnish produced film at the time and grossed over $350 million worldwide, becoming the seventh highest-grossing video game film to date. While The Angry Birds Movie received mixed reviews, its financial success led to the release of The Angry Birds Movie 2 in 2019, coinciding with the franchise’s 10th anniversary. Despite The Angry Birds Movie 2 only earning over $150 million worldwide, production on The Angry Birds Movie 3 was officially announced in May 2024.

Angry Birds Books and Attractions Explained

In 2012, Rovio opened Angry Birds Land in the Finland amusement park Särkänniemi and later brought the attraction to Malaysia’s Johor Bahru City Centre in 2014. That same year, Rovio and the American comic book company IDW Publishing produced a three-year-long run of Angry Birds Comics made up of 27 issues in total. In 2017, the comic strip site GoComics began producing Angry Birds strips based on The Angry Birds Movie, which concluded in 2020. In coordination with the franchise’s 15th anniversary, Angry Birds will once again appear in two comic books in the style of the original Angry Birds classic comics.


The Legacy and Impact of Angry Birds

The Angry Birds franchise has become one of the most prolific and successful video game franchises of all time. By 2015, all of the Angry Birds games were downloaded over 3 billion times, becoming one of the most purchased game series of all time. Angry Birds’ official sequel, Angry Birds 2, has since been downloaded over 360 million times and generated over $500 million alone worldwide. The Angry Birds property launched Rovio into becoming one of the world’s most valuable gaming companies in the world, as shown when Sega acquired the Angry Birds creator for $776 million in 2023. Today, all of Rovio’s games throughout its 21-year-long lifespan have been downloaded over 5 billion times collectively across numerous platforms.


Angry Birds‘ simple yet addictive gameplay not only sparked the success of Rovio as a company but mobile gaming as a whole. It helped ensure that mobile gaming had a chance to succeed against the PC and home video game console giants that had reigned supreme for decades. Other mobile developers and games such as Plants vs. Zombies and Clash of Clans would go on to utilize similar strategies and see similar fame as Rovio; nevertheless, mobile games seldom reach the heights of Angry Birds. With its fun art design and accessible gameplay to play on the go or at home, Angry Birds has become not only one of the most successful video games of all times, but one of the most successful properties created in the 21st century.

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