Kotaku writer plays every availible Angry Birds Game..

February 4, 2019 3:22 AM

.. so you don't have to. First released in 2009 for iOS, the original Angry Birds mobile game now has 22 official incarnations, most of which are licensed spin-offs. "Did you realize they’ve made 22 Angry Birds games? We all learned something today." - Zack Zwiezen: Kotaku.com

For what started out as small mobile game, Angry Birds is now somewhat of a multimedia / merchandising money making machine.

In 2016 there was an animated Movie. Budget $73 million, reported Box Office - £352.3 million so a sequel is due in late 2019.

There are multiple Theme Park rides and full blown Park Attractions.

And other miscellaneous merchandise out the wazoo: [ Board games, Official Jenga, Plushies, A retail store in Helsinki and deals with Mattel, Hasbro, Star Wars (pre Disney merger?) and Hot Wheels].

Founded in 2003, Rovio Entertainment [creators of Angry Birds] was founded by three friends, and now employs almost 400 people and in 2017 had a reported revenue of $140.3 million. [pdf link to earnings report.]

Aside from accusations of contributing to the mobile 'In-app purchase' plague phenomena, the original games were accused of incorporating deliberate 'leaky' data design that could aide tracking of individuals by interested parties.

posted by Faintdreams (25 comments total)

Huh. So it's a thing that still exists.

My favorite thing about Angry Birds was the candy, which was genuinely delicious. Now I realized I haven't seen it for ages :(
posted by Vesihiisi at 3:43 AM on February 4, 2019

My kids watch the animated series. There is no dialogue so I guess they don't have to localize it.
posted by Literaryhero at 3:52 AM on February 4, 2019

I've had to sit through the movie not once, but twice. Thanks, kids.
posted by pipeski at 4:00 AM on February 4, 2019

Hey, I liked that movie! Much better than similar product-to-big-screen features like [shudder] Transformers.
posted by sexyrobot at 4:35 AM on February 4, 2019

I may still have one or two of the games on my phone. One of the most interesting/amusing tertiary aspects of the game for me was that I saw a player character named Angry Bird on City of Heroes back in the day. Thinly-veiled expies of DC and Marvel characters were often reported by other players mindful of the prohibition against copyright infringement, because of Marvel suing NCsoft early in the game's existence, but no one thought that Rovio would go after them for Angry Bird.
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:37 AM on February 4, 2019

And, oh! HaHaHa...there's an Angry Birds Transformers game. Something that we can hate together!
posted by sexyrobot at 4:58 AM on February 4, 2019 [12 favorites]

I honestly thought this thread was about Flappy Bird, not Angry Birds, until maybe halfway through the comments when reality clicked in. The world was really, really strange for a couple minutes there.
posted by ardgedee at 5:22 AM on February 4, 2019 [2 favorites]

I remember when they purchased and rebranded the very fun physics game Casey's Contraptions, but it didn't go anywhere, because no birds.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 5:27 AM on February 4, 2019 [1 favorite]

Beatrix T. Cattenborough's favorite throw toy is a yellow Angry Bird. It is now, of course, a kind of spit- and dust-encrusted off-drab-yellow color.
posted by slkinsey at 5:32 AM on February 4, 2019 [2 favorites]

My son LOVES these birds. He has a poster on the wall, a bunch of stuffed animals, etc. He has two of the games on his iPad - Bad Piggies and Angry Birds Rio because he likes to knock over monkeys.
posted by 80 Cats in a Dog Suit at 5:50 AM on February 4, 2019

This is my Angry Birds story.

My son has autism, and although he's "high functioning" (insert gagging noises here over that terminology) he was always a very concrete child. He never played with toys the way other children did, and particularly did not use toys to create imaginative stories.

He was obsessed with the original Angry Birds video game, and with a number of their sequels.

When he was 7, he was searching for Angry Birds Let's Play videos on YouTube and he found a channel called BanjoVideos, which at the time was largely a made up of videos made by a kid somewhat older than my kid, who made up adventures with his Angry Birds plush toys, filmed those adventures, and posted them to YouTube.

For a bit, these were the only videos my kid would watch. And then, gradually, he began to imitate the kind of imaginative play that he saw on the channel. He would, for the first time, give his toys voices and inner lives. From imitative behavior he quickly moved on to independent imaginative play with toys ... a few years later than his typical peers, but he got there.

Angry Birds and the guy who runs Banjo Videos will always hold a special place in my heart, because they somehow came together to teach my son how to actually play.
posted by anastasiav at 6:18 AM on February 4, 2019 [87 favorites]

Never heard of Bad Piggies, so I just tried it -- it started out pretty fun but there were So Many Ads - I ended up deleting it after 2 levels. Oh well.

For what it's worth, the analog game for kids is actually a lot of fun.
posted by Mchelly at 6:32 AM on February 4, 2019 [1 favorite]

Well I just learnt that there are official Angry Birds Lego sets, so that's a thing that exists.
posted by Faintdreams at 6:38 AM on February 4, 2019 [2 favorites]

My kiddo was really into Angry Birds 1, the Space version and Bad Piggies for a while. They were fun games.

But like all good things, capitalism insists we must beat it to death for every penny we can knock out of it.
posted by emjaybee at 7:09 AM on February 4, 2019 [1 favorite]

I've played the first one, and I won't let my kids play any of them.

Even though you start the first Angry Birds with a nominal motive and a goal of knocking down forts and castles, halfway through it you’re destroying civil infrastructure (railways, power stations, airports and farms) and by the end of it you’re sending your birds to destroy hospitals, apartment buildings, churches and schools, as the brightly lit day you began with slowly turns to night in the background.

The first Angry Birds was is quite literally a game where you cannot advance without killing enough residents of a church or school, and if you can't beat that level on your own efforts, you can spend real DLC money on an "Mighty Eagle" to do that work for you. There's no way that's accidental, that the symbolism of this game is sharpened to a fine point and we somehow just never talk about it.

I've written about this elsewhere, please forgive the self-link, but I am 100% convinced that the original Angry Birds is a sort of Guernica-style antiwar art-protest game before it took off and turned into a money spigot and nobody could be allowed in on the joke.
posted by mhoye at 7:43 AM on February 4, 2019 [10 favorites]

Uhm MHoye, I don't understand.

What you say might be true of games after the original one (which doesn't make it in any way all right), but I see no evidence of that in the original game?

I'm mean my google fu might be failing me but I I can't find picture nor video evidence that the Pig structures in the original game even had designated / stated purposes like infrastructure and schools?

I've played most of the original and would've found that kind of setup too abhorrent to make a post about.

I really hope that I didn't' play those levels and was blinkered to the games purpose buy over focussing on the game mechanics..., but it's not impossible.
posted by Faintdreams at 8:14 AM on February 4, 2019 [1 favorite]

I've played most of the original and would've found that kind of setup too abhorrent to make a post about.

Take a look. Tell me that's not a bunch of kids sitting in a classroom. Or that this isn't a school bus stop. Or that you don't see an open-air concert, or a cathedral or a bunker full of kids.
posted by mhoye at 8:43 AM on February 4, 2019 [4 favorites]

That's a fascinating read, mhoye.
posted by Nelson at 8:47 AM on February 4, 2019

MHoye - The initial original game did NOT include 'Danger Above' which is featured in the video clip examples above.

The initial iOS version of the game included a single episode entitled "Poached Eggs", which contained three themed chapters, each with 21 levels. From time to time, Rovio has released free upgrades that include additional content, such as new levels, new in-game objects and even new birds. As updates have been released, they have been incorporated into the game's full version offered for download from each platform's application store.[26]

The first update released on February 11, 2010 added a new episode called "Mighty Hoax", containing two new chapters with 21 levels each. Updates released on April 6, 2010 added the "Golden Eggs" feature, which placed hidden golden eggs throughout the game that would unlock bonus content when found, and a new episode called "Danger Above", which initially contained a single chapter of 15 levels. Two later updates added two more chapters to "Danger Above", each with 15 levels. "The Big Setup" episode, released on July 18, 2010, added a new chapter with 15 levels and additional Golden Egg levels.[27] "The Big Setup" was later given two more chapters of 15 levels each. - Souce Wikipedia

I don't want to thread-sit so I'll bow out now.
posted by Faintdreams at 9:23 AM on February 4, 2019 [3 favorites]

mhoye: "The first Angry Birds was is quite literally a game where you cannot advance without killing enough residents of a church or school,"

Not entirely unrelated to the "Angry Birds = ISIS" theory.
posted by chavenet at 10:14 AM on February 4, 2019 [1 favorite]

I remember Angry Birds as being a simple reskin of Crush the Castle. Now that I check, though, Crush the Castle came out in April 2009 and Angry Birds launched in December of the same year. They can't have got it turned around that quickly, surely.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 11:21 AM on February 4, 2019 [1 favorite]

I also remember mostly being annoyed that Angry Birds was sucking the air out of the until-then-burgeoning trebuchet game market.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 11:42 AM on February 4, 2019 [2 favorites]

This list doesn't include the touchscreen + ABXY buttons versions of Angry Birds that you can play on the in-flight entertainment systems of some airlines.
posted by L.P. Hatecraft at 12:51 PM on February 4, 2019

Angry Birds Lego sets are actually quite great. My favorite is the "Pig City Teardown" from a couple of years ago.
posted by of strange foe at 1:20 PM on February 4, 2019

Pah! I'd be more impressed if said Kotaku writer played e.g. the hundreds of Angry Birds predecessors on Newgrounds.
posted by I'm always feeling, Blue at 5:20 PM on February 4, 2019 [1 favorite]