Chapter 10: Angry Birds

The elastic of the catapult groans under pressure. Suddenly it snaps furiously back, releasing a small bird high into the blue sky of the Pacific Ocean. Faster and higher the bird climbs, now just a speck above the island below. For a moment it seems suspended in space. Then slowly, delightfully, it reaches the peak of its trajectory and begins to fall to the ground, tracing an elegant arc through the air.

Smash! The bird collides with a wooden castle on the island’s surface. The beams of the castle wobble and creak. For a moment it looks like the structure will hold, but then the bird tumbles down the outer wall, knocking out a vital support beam. The castle shudders and collapses, instantly killing its inhabitants: two green pigs.

The bird squawks for a moment — perhaps shocked by its involuntary slaughter of the pigs — it then sheds a few feathers and, without any particular fanfare, gently explodes.

This surrealist fantasy is a description of the game Angry Birds, one of the best-selling titles in the history of videogames. It’s an astonishing achievement for a game that its creators, Rovio, initially regarded as a flop in the App Store’s biggest markets.

A Global Hit

Recently, the Guinness Book of World Records has recognized Angry Birds as the top paid app store game; it has been downloaded over 250 million times and continues to average an unfathomable 1 million downloads every single day. Rovio claims to have data that demonstrates gamers across the world collectively spend a staggering 200 million minutes per day playing Angry Birds on their devices — and over 1 million hours per day on iOS devices alone.

“Think of all the other stuff they could be doing that’s so much more boring,” said Mikael Hed, CEO of Rovio, when confronted with this enormous expenditure of global man-hours. “Nowadays, people have to be entertained all the time, whenever you have just a few moments spare… much of those 200 million minutes comes from this type of micro spare time, filling the little gaps.”

It’s a perfectly rational argument, and world governments agree with him. Angry Birds is the only iPhone game to have been publicly endorsed by heads of state. The Telegraph reported that British Prime Minister, David Cameron, is “a huge Angry Birds fan” and “uses his iPad to play the game which involves catapulting wingless and legless birds to destroy green pigs trying to eat their eggs.”

Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, has publicly thanked Rovio’s marketing leader Peter Vesterbacka for his work on the game. At the International Economic Forum in St. Petersburg, Medvedev stood up and made an announcement to the audience:

“Before talking politics, I would like to thank Mr. Vesterbacka for creating an occupation for a huge number of officials who now know what to do in their free, and not-so-free, time. I saw them playing [Angry Birds] myself many times.”

Beyond its influence on global politics, the game has made its impact felt throughout society. Angry Birds has a celebrity fan club that includes such improbable luminaries as author Salmon Rushdie (who proclaimed he was “something of a master at Angry Birds”) satirist Jon Stewart, and comedian Conan O’Brien.

O’Brien went so far as to build a working replica of the game out of Ikea furniture and break it apart on his show.

“We have decided to honor, tonight, Finland’s greatest contribution to mankind,” Conan began his set piece. “I’m talking, of course, about the videogame, Angry Birds.” He then proceeded to smash the life-size game to pieces by firing inflatable Angry Birds at the furniture.

Teen pop sensation Justin Bieber has also made his love of the game clear. For better or worse, Bieber is a social barometer for huge swathes of the North American teen population and Rovio could not have hoped for better publicity than when Bieber tweeted his open endorsement of the app: “I love the game Angry Birds. It’s so sick.”

More than any other iPhone game, Angry Birds has crept its way into the popular culture. There is something supernaturally compelling about the game mechanism — a psychological desire I’ll return to later in this chapter — that keeps players coming back. This, coupled with cute character design and a strong game narrative, has made much of the iPhone owning population fall in love with these strange birds on their remote Pacific island. Rovio has capitalized on this affection for the characters and given physical reality to the birds in the app. You can buy merchandise from the line of Angry Birds stuffed toys — Rovio has already sold over 60,000 of them. Amazingly, it’s estimated that nearly half of Rovio’s revenue these days is from merchandise and licensing — goods that exist beyond the universe of the game itself.

52nd Time Lucky

Founded in 2004, and originally called Relude, Rovio is run by two Finnish cousins, Niklas and Mikael Hed. The company was initially funded by Mikael’s father, the entrepreneur Kaj Hed, to the tune of 1 million — not that this money ultimately helped Rovio, they would burn through the cash well before glory hit. Although to the outside world it appears as if Angry Birds was an overnight success, the true story of Rovio is one of financial disaster, heartbreak, disappointment, 52-failed-games, and — most importantly — hard graft against the all the odds. Today Angry Birds sits perched on the roof of the App Store, the iconic iPhone success story, but before it got there the family-run Rovio would fall into commercial ruin, almost collapse, and narrowly dodge bankruptcy.

Mikael Hed, one of the two cousins behind the global blockbuster Angry Birds.

SOURCE: Reproduced with permission of Chillingo © 2011 Rovio Mobile.

Two Unstoppable Cousins

Mikael and Niklas, much like the Doodle Jump brothers, grew up with a fierce interest in creating videogames. The two cousins would discuss game ideas with each other throughout childhood. Niklas had a particular interest in physics games that he would code and show off to friends. His fascination with programming led to a Computer Science degree at Helsinki University, while his cousin Mikael served in the Finnish Army for a year before enrolling in business school — studying first in Europe, and then the United States.

After graduating, Niklas persuaded Mikael to join him in building a video games company to sell software to the mobile phone industry. These were the days before the iPhone, when every game contract had to be carefully and elaborately negotiated with individual cellphone carriers. It was a logistical nightmare and Mikael was initially reluctant to get involved.

But Niklas could be pretty persuasive. The young man was buoyed by his success in winning a competition to create a game for an early smartphone. He eventually convinced Mikael that, on the basis of this success, they could make a go of the mobile games market.

Niklas also had the blessing of Hewlett-Packard’s influential communications wizard, Peter Vesterbacka.

The Vesterbacka Factor

Vesterbacka warmed to Niklas at the smartphone game competition Niklas had won in 2003. The event was sponsored by HP and Vesterbacka was a judge on the panel. He was extremely impressed by the work that Niklas had put in, telling him in no uncertain terms to “start your own mobile company.” Little did he know it then, but seven years later, Vesterbacka would leave his job and join Rovio to control marketing plans at the height of the company’s success.

Mikael rented space to work in and Relude began client work for other games developers. But conflicts with his father Kaj — the most substantial investor in the fledgling outfit — quickly turned the operation sour. By the middle of 2005, the situation became unworkable and Mikael quit the company, choosing to focus on publishing independent comic books instead.

Without Mikael to exert an influence on Rovio’s direction, the company spiraled further into crisis. Although Rovio continued to win work from an impressive client roster including EA and Namco, there was a feeling inside the company that the hit game titles that were supposed to have been Rovio’s focus would never materialize. As development costs piled up, Rovio strayed ever further from its initial plan. The company began to experience huge losses.

Burn Money, Burn

By the beginning of 2009, Rovio’s finances were up in flames — portentous for a company whose Finnish name translates to “bonfire.” In its darkest hour, Rovio was forced to slash its 50-person workforce to just 12. It was then that a sense of reality set in: Rovio had been conceived as a hit games company; the problem was, they had none. Just when it looked like the company had collapsed, Niklas had a revelation. He convinced Kaj to rehire Mikael, cede control of the company’s direction to him, and move their focus away from client work. And the event that inspired this critical decision for the future of Rovio? It was the invention of the iPhone and the introduction of the Apple App Store.

Niklas recognized that the iPhone solved many of Rovio’s problems. No longer would the company have to rely on the marketing teams of larger publishers, or deal with the bitter negotiation with cellphone carriers. The App Store meant worldwide distribution, and direct access to millions of customers. Apple would be their publishing arm, and they could concentrate on teasing out that deeply precious and frustratingly elusive gem: A hit app.

Client work for other games companies tided the company over temporarily. Then, in the Spring of 2009, Rovio’s lead game designer, Jaakko Iisalo opened up Photoshop and began to draw a game screenshot. Iisalo would often pitch ideas to the team and this would be one of many ideas he had worked on for Rovio. He drew some colored birds and matched the color of each bird to a colored block. The idea was that tapping the colored block would cause a bird of the same color to bounce across and smash it. The screenshot looked like a shadow of the game Angry Birds would eventually become, but there was something to it, or so Iisalo thought.

The Angry Birds characters evolved from early sketches by Jaakko Iisalo.

SOURCE: Reproduced with permission of Rovio © 2011 Rovio Mobile.

Iisalo showed the screenshot to Niklas and Mikael who were instantly taken by the bird’s angry faces and the absurdity of their flightlessness. The team decided to add pigs as the bird’s enemy — coloring them green to imply swine-flu infection, and later creating a backstory accusing the pigs of stealing the bird’s eggs — an explanation for the cruel attacks the player would have to subject them to.

In testing the game, the designers quickly discovered that every minor change to the code would result in the programmer getting helplessly absorbed in playing rounds of the game, rather than attending to the task at hand.

“With our earlier titles, most friends and family members had usually taken a cursory look at the games, and given some generally positive feedback,” Mikael would explain later. “But with Angry Birds the response was nearly always the same — they took the iPhone, found a quiet nook, and played the game for an hour, before the phone could be pried out of their hands.” This was seriously addictive stuff.

Many players found Angry Birds highly addictive from the start.

SOURCE: Reproduced with permission of Chillingo © 2011 Rovio Mobile.

A Rich History of Flying Animals

The Angry Birds concept was ultimately not a wholly original invention — almost no great invention is — but Rovio’s combination of gameplay elements in the game was both novel and outstanding. Angry Birds comes from a rich heritage of physics games that involve hurling objects through the air at collapsible structures — games like Crush the Castle and its precursor Castle Cloud. There are also numerous other animal-throwing games that contain elements of Angry Bird’s physics mechanism, but fall far short of its sweet-spot combination of gameplay, characterization, and graphics — Hedgehog Launch and Toss the Turtle, for example, are earlier examples of creatures used as projectiles. However, although it’s possible to point to these earlier games as significantly influential — and some of Rovio’s detractors go further — these earlier games all contained single elements of what would become the whole of Angry Birds. It was only Angry Birds that combined these disparate game elements in such a universally satisfying format. The Rovio team’s skill lay in recognizing what worked and adapting it, Mikael would later describe Angry Birds as “really the sum of all of its parts.”

Examining the prototype of the game, back before launch, Rovio were thrilled with its addictive qualities: They thought they had a hit. Niklas and Mikael were convinced this would be the game to turn Rovio around; it would be a pay-off for years of chaos and uncertainty in the company. They decided to invest just over €100,000 into the development of the game and launched Angry Birds onto the App Store at the very end of 2009. That December, Rovio held its collective breath and watched to see what would happen.

Angry Birds flopped.

A Terrible Reception

The big markets — the U.S. and the UK — took a look, shrugged their shoulders at the game and ignored it. Shaken by the reaction, Rovio noticed something interesting: the smaller App Stores were easier to compete in. They decided to concentrate on these smaller stores before trying again with the biggest markets. Getting to the top of the App Store in Finland, for example, required only a few hundred sales per day, compared to the many thousand a game would need to achieve in the U.S. As Rovio concentrated its attention on them, other European countries followed suit — the company sold over 30,000 copies of Angry Birds in these smaller markets. Evidence of success in these territories would, Rovio thought, help convince Apple to promote their app. But rather than attempt to approach Apple on their own, Rovio decided to team up with the then-independent games publisher Chillingo.

Chillingo was a UK games developer that already had a reputation for high-quality apps and a relationship with Apple that would be invaluable in securing the last essential ingredient in the success of Angry Birds: a coveted promotional banner in the App Store.

Total Avian Domination

The persistence of Rovio and Chillingo caught Apple’s attention and it was agreed between them that Angry Birds would be given a prized spot in the UK App Store as Apple’s Game of the Week in the second week of February 2010. Niklas and Mikael saw this as a one-shot chance to push Angry Birds to the top of the charts. So, the cousins began a series of enhancements to the game, adding more than 40 new levels, building a lite (free) version of the game, and designing a YouTube trailer to promote it. Their campaign was strategically designed to impress the iPhone masses when Apple’s promotion hit. And hit it did.

More and more levels were added, along with a lite version of the game.

SOURCE: Reproduced with permission of Chillingo © 2011 Rovio Mobile.

In the first week of the promotion, Angry Birds shot up the charts, from obscurity in the very lowest reaches of the games charts, and all the way to number one. The Hed cousins were stunned. But it was just the beginning; by April the same year the game was also at number one in the U.S. The Angry Birds phenomena had begun and there was no stopping it. The colorful birds that began life as a screenshot in Rovio’s dour office block in Finland were now hurling their flightless bodies across the screen of every iPhone from Tokyo to Cairo — this was total avian domination. Simplicity and smart design had won over millions of fans.

“There’s this old wisdom,” Mikael told GamePro. “[A good game] has to be easy to pick up and play but hard to master. The ‘easy to learn’ part was really important to us. When you see one screenshot of the game you know what you have to do.”

“Angry Birds is simple, but it still has depth. It has to be so much fun that players want to return to the game over and over again. Angry Birds achieved precisely that.”

Bigger Than the iPhone

Today it’s estimated that Rovio has a yearly revenue in excess of around $80 million and stands alone as an App Store success story that has transcended the iPhone platform. The Angry Birds have fluttered their way into popular culture and even Hollywood. In what seems like the ultimate endorsement of Rovio’s extraordinary success, the company was asked to make a tie-in game for 20th Century Fox’s animated feature film, Rio. In this special edition of the app, Angry Birds Rio, the Angry Birds characters share a game universe with the film’s animated heroes — it sold over 10 million copies in 10 days. This licensing deal is typical of Rovio’s very cautious and intelligent approach to capitalizing on their hit game.

“We saw that most gaming companies had then immediately tried to make another hit game,” Mikael explained to CNBC. “We realized that had very rarely worked. Rather, we started to look at what we could do around Angry Birds and if there was a way that we could build this into an entertainment franchise. Games are what we are very strong at, and we will do other games besides Angry Birds as well, but now as we are executing our media company strategy, we’re not in a tremendous hurry to churn out game after game after game.”

This focused approach has meant that Angry Birds Rio is just one of many themed editions that Rovio has created for the game, extending their flagship brand further and further into the popular consciousness. Others include a Halloween edition — in which the pigs are joined by pumpkins — and a summer edition called Pignic.

The Halloween edition.

SOURCE: Reproduced with permission of Chillingo © 2011 Rovio Mobile.

Now there is talk of an Angry Birds theme park.

“Believe it or not, we have had such suggestions, and I believe Angry Birds Land was actually the name they used,” Mikael told Reuters. “Whether there will be a theme park dedicated to Angry Birds or not, I don’t know, but I would be surprised if within 10 years there wouldn’t be at least a theme park with something related to Angry Birds in it.”

There’s even an animated TV series in the works.

The merchandizing craze has enveloped Angry Birds, with T-shirts, stuffed animals, and more.

SOURCE: Reproduced with permission of Chillingo © 2011 Rovio Mobile.

“We have been looking at that for quite a while, and that is definitely one of my personal big focus areas right now — to work on broadcast content for Angry Birds,” Mikael told C21 Media Magazine at the beginning of 2011.

Rovio struggled to sell the game to Android users — a notoriously difficult market to retail software in — so gave it away for free. They now rack up around $1 million each month from pure advertising revenue on the platform.

Setting the App Standard

More than any other game, Angry Birds is responsible for the public perception that app designer is one of the hottest jobs on the planet right now. Videogames were always creeping towards the status of Hollywood blockbusters, but with budgets to match. Angry Birds — despite the harsh and difficult reality of its birth — looks simple to the outside observer. In part it’s the deceptive accessibility of this game design that has inspired so many others to give the App Store a shot. It’s also elevated the games programmer to a status of social acceptability that has historically escaped them. We have the exploding birds to thank.

Angry Birds seems like a romantic story of easy success, but it’s not.

SOURCE: Reproduced with permission of Chillingo © 2011 Rovio Mobile.

Summary

Here’s a roundup of the important points covered in this chapter:

• Angry Birds was not an overnight success. The Hed cousins took 52 tries until they created their hit app and in the process the company was almost destroyed.

• Angry Birds took an existing game paradigm — the castle and catapult format — and polished and evolved it. In retrospect it’s easy to point to the reasons why Angry Birds is so compelling, but the simplicity of the game’s execution is deceptive. It’s hard to make something look this easy. Rovio is a great example of a small app company who took the time to build a quality product and teamed up with the right people to market it. The results were spectacular.

• Rovio saw the value of good marketing. The company didn’t attempt to take on the app market alone; they sought the services of a much more experienced team to give their game the boost it needed. Creating a great app is just a small part of the equation. It’s critically important to get your software seen by as many people as possible. If your app is addictive and well designed, you’ll easily reap the rewards of more public exposure. However, you need to be sure that it’s worth the time and money to promote. No amount of publicity will sell a bad app. Unlike Hollywood, where awful films can be pushed to profitability by a concerted marketing drive, app consumers are extremely fickle and demanding. There are literally thousands of other apps they could spend their money on if yours is not up to scratch.

• Angry Birds is the prime example of an app that successfully expanded its game universe beyond the iPhone hardware. Rovio organized tie-in deals with movie studios, and clothes and toy manufacturers. The Angry Bird characters exist in many different forms of merchandise and the company makes a considerable chunk of its profits outside the App Store, selling physical goods.

• Rovio ran an interesting test case for the Android platform — the rival to Apple’s iPhone. The company appears to have concluded that Android users are unlikely to pay for app software — Angry Birds is free on Android — but that decent profits can be made through in-app advertising banners. Whether this model is sustainable for non-superstar developers is a question that will be answered over the coming years.