Angry Birds is a Finnish game created by Rovio Entertainment.
How it all started
Rovio started in 2003 when its creators, young students, won a game development competition and decided to start their own gaming company. The programmers developed 51 games, and all of them were pretty good, but it was extremely difficult to distribute them.
The developers wanted to give up many times and close the company that was on the verge of bankruptcy, but in the end they decided to try again.
Why are they angry?
Angry Birds was born in early 2009 when Rovio had only twelve employees left, and the rest of the staff had to be laid off.
Senior game designer Jaakko Iisalo sketched angry birds that look like balloons without legs or wings. The team looked at the picture for a long time because one question troubled them.
“There was something about these characters,” says Mikael, founder of Rovio. “These birds don't have legs and can't fly. And they're very angry. We've all started to think about what made them so mad. Such simple characters, and we all thought and thought... It was a bit of magic.”
What does swine flu have to do with it?
So, the developers have been racking their brains for a long time why the birds are so angry. And then a simple idea came up: maybe someone stole their eggs?
At that time, there was a lot of news about swine flu. That's when the creators of Rovio came up with the main villains: birds' eggs were stolen... by pigs!
Now that they had an idea, all they had to do was come up with interesting gameplay.
The birth of a masterpiece
A budget of 25,000 euros was allocated for the development, and the team started the project. He was cute and funny, so the developers treated him like a favorite hobby.
Angry Birds took about six months to create and was based on gameplay from the popular game Crush the Castle at the time. During this time, the company released 4 more games, but the developers knew that everyone's favorite bird game would become something special.
Every time a developer tested a feature, they unknowingly “stuck” in the game for at least another quarter of an hour. Ridiculous but true: the founder's mom played the Angry Birds pilot so much that she burned a Christmas turkey!
Angry Birds enter the market
However, the game did not become an immediate hit. The game was released on the App Store in December 2009, and the response to it in the US and UK has been tepid. But Rovio decided to focus on small countries. The game soon reached the top in its native Finland, then became popular in Sweden and Denmark, and then “conquered” Greece and the Czech Republic. When the number of downloads reached 40,000, larger markets also became interested in the game.
This is a success!
On February 11, 2010, Angry Birds became the UK App Store's game of the week. And then there was a breakthrough! Angry Birds has gone from number 600 on the list of games to No. 1! By April 2010, the game was also number one on the US App Store.
Rovio started getting decent money from App Store downloads and Android ads.
By 2013, more than 30,000 Angry Birds products had been released and sold in 500 locations around the world.
Angry Birds is more than just a game. This is an amazing story of self-confidence, hard work and well-deserved success. Angry Birds has become one of the most popular games of all time, with more than 3 billion downloads.
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