10 Years of Angry Birds

It’s the casual mobile gaming sensation that has been downloaded over 3 billion times and has created a multi-media franchise which includes movies, tv shows, and theme park attractions. For many, it was their first gaming experience on the emerging smartphone market. For others, it was their first game, full stop. Although it’s both loved and loathed by the gaming community, the influence of Angry Birds on the industry throughout the 2010s cannot be overstated. And like any iconic franchise, it was inspired by flash games, mock screenshots, and the swine flu.

In early 2009, senior game designer Jaakko Iisalo approached his co-workers at Finnish development studio Rovio with a screenshot he had created. It depicted wingless and legless birds looking particularly angry, possibly because they were wingless and legless. It gave no clues as to what kind of game they would feature in, but the staff were so enamoured by the colourful characters that they decided to attach them to a project, regardless.

An idea was then hatched to create a physics-based puzzle game similar to the popular online flash games of the time. Given they couldn’t fly, the birds would be rocketed out of a slingshot towards structures with the intent of wrecking them to the ground. Occupying these structures were green pigs looking to steal and feast upon the birds’ eggs. Pigs were chosen as the enemy because it was 2009 and the swine flu pandemic had reached its most alarming spread.

Angry Birds released on iOS platforms on the 11th of December 2009. For a series that would go on to sell in the billions, its launch was a fairly quiet affair. However, in mid-2010, the game went on to top the UK and US App Store charts where it remained for close to a year. Its meteoric success can be attributed to the game’s accessible and addicting gameplay, its family-friendly tone, and being timed perfectly with when the smartphone gaming scene was truly taking off.

These days, it’s hard to find someone who hasn’t at least dabbled in one of the Angry Birds games. Rovio struck gold with that first release, and its original cast of characters quickly became the feathered faces of mobile gaming. Red was the main protagonist who could issue a battle cry when the screen was tapped. The Blues were three small birds who would split apart and attack the structure with a shotgun-like approach. Chuck would shoot towards the pigs at immense speed. Bomb would, well, explode. And Matilda could drop bomb eggs onto the unsuspecting green swine.

Rovio supported the first Angry Birds with a steady stream of new levels, chapters and bird-types. Its success also warranted ports to Android, Windows phones, consoles, handhelds and PC. What followed was a string of Angry Birds games that incrementally evolved the popular formula. Angry Birds Seasons (2010) increased the difficulty while theming its levels around the holidays. Angry Birds Rio (2011) was the first game in the series to be tied to a brand while also introducing boss fights as an extra challenge. Angry Birds Friends (2012) was originally designed for Facebook and included social aspects to the experience. And, Angry Birds Space (2012) set its levels on planets with their own gravitational pull.

Angry Birds Star Wars released in 2012 and themed its levels and characters around the original trilogy. The Star Wars influence also extended to the gameplay with the birds being able to wield lightsabers, shoot blasters, and force push their way through the stormtrooper pigs. A follow-up, Angry Birds Star Wars II, arrived in 2013 with its focus being on the prequel trilogy. The Transformers brand then got into the Angry Birds action with a 2014 side-scrolling shoot-em up starring the Autobirds and the Deceptihogs.

Rovio kept the Angry Birds machine rolling throughout the decade with a myriad of spinoffs branching out into different genres. These included kart racing games, match-3 games, RPGs, and even a VR title. At long last, Angry Birds 2 arrived in 2015 as the official sequel to the one that started it all. The game didn’t receive the same accolades as the original due to its free-to-play design and randomised gameplay elements. However, the game was still a huge success, being downloaded over 20 million times in just its first week.

Since then, Rovio has kept the Angry Birds franchise in the air with more spinoff titles, a ridiculous amount of television shows, and two computer-animated feature films released in 2016 and 2019, respectively. Whether you’re a fan of Angry Birds or not, there can be no denying the franchise’s influence on the casual gaming scene exploding in the way it has in the last decade. It’s easy to draw a direct line from the mega popularity of Angry Birds to other mobile sensations like Candy Crush Saga, Flappy Birds and Pokémon Go. Whether Angry Birds has another decade of dominance in front of it is yet to be seen, but it’s hard to imagine that Jaakko Iisalo had any idea what behemoth he was creating when he made that first simulated screenshot of angry-looking wingless and legless birds.