Their fifty-second attempt
Rovio, a small Finnish studio, had made fifty-one games and was running out of money. The fifty-second began as a drawing: a round, wingless, legless bird with furious eyebrows, with no game attached to it at all. The team liked the picture enough to build something around it.
They added a SLINGSHOT and some PIGS, and released it on phones in 2009. It has been downloaded billions of times since, which is a considerable return on a sketch.
The first game that felt right on a touchscreen
ANGRY BIRDS arrived when smartphones were new and most games on them were clumsy conversions of things designed for buttons. Dragging a finger back against a stretched rubber band and letting go was something no controller could do, and it needed no explanation whatsoever — a three-year-old works it out immediately.
It fitted how people actually use phones, too. A LEVEL lasts half a minute, can be attempted while waiting for a bus, and finishes either with three stars or with an obvious reason to try once more.
A physics lesson wearing a disguise
Every shot is a projectile problem. LAUNCH too steeply and the bird drops short; too shallow and it thumps into the front wall. Players work out by feel that the flight path is a curve, that the peak comes about halfway, and that speed at the moment of impact matters more than anything.
The TOWER behaves properly as well. Take out the BLOCKS at the bottom and everything above comes down on the PIGS, while WOOD, GLASS and STONE each break in their own way. Nobody mentions gravity, structures or momentum, and every player ends up with a working feel for all three. Teachers have used it for exactly this reason, because arguing about the best angle of attack is a great deal more engaging than being told what a parabola is.
Birds with job descriptions
Each bird is really a tool. RED simply hits things. CHUCK accelerates in a straight line when tapped, so he punches through WOOD. BOMB explodes, which is what STONE calls for. MATILDA drops an egg beneath her and rockets upwards, useful for anything sheltering behind cover.
Choosing which of the FLOCK to send, in which order and at what angle, is the entire game. It is the same reasoning as picking the right tool out of a box, with the difference that the wrong choice here produces a very satisfying SMASH anyway.
From a pocket-money game to theme parks
The success got out of hand quickly. There were soft toys, a cartoon series, two films, branded sweets, cookbooks and actual theme-park attractions in Finland and elsewhere. For a few years the GREEN PIGS and the furious BIRDS were on absolutely everything, including breakfast cereal.
Fashions in phone games move fast and the FLOCK is no longer everywhere, but the underlying lesson outlasted the merchandise: a game should be understandable within a second of looking at it, playable in thirty, and tempting enough to retry after a failure. Practically every successful phone game since has been built to that same shape.