It was the late golden autumn of 2009. The finances of the Finnish company Rovio were singing romances, although the developers already had more than 50 small games for smartphones under their belt. They had no idea that their new project, called Angry Birds, would make such a splash. It was that rare case where the crane was better than the tit in the hand. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves and start from the beginning…
A designer named Jakko Iisalo had a marvelous idea for a game: crazy birds ramming the walls of buildings. Jakko made the first sketch and showed it to Tuomo Lehtiten, the head of development. He immediately loved the idea and the team got to work. On that very first sketch was Red – who would later become the symbol of the Evil Birds and one of the most recognizable game characters – the Blue Three and the long-billed Chuck.
But the wise Rovio decided that the game lacked antagonists, the birds needed an adversary. The developers got creative and looked back at the world. At that time the H1N1 pandemic was raging and the enemies were the spreaders of the disease – pigs. The authors ironically emphasized their message by painting the pigs sickly green. And in order to somehow justify the animosity between the characters of the opposing camps, Rovio came up with a story. The pigs went to steal for eggs, and the feathery ones are eternally vengeful, eager to get their eggs back.
The original idea was for the player to swipe the screen and throw the birds at the pigs. Such controls were terribly inconvenient, and then the developers added a slingshot to the game. This technique quickly caught on, because all brilliant is simple.
The first release of the game was held December 10, 2009 for the Apple IOS platform in the App Store. Later came out and on Android, MeeGo Harmattan, Bada, Symbian, WebOS, OS X, Meamo 5, Microsoft Windows and Java.
The first game was called “Angry Birds Classic” and quickly became popular already in February 2010 on the UK AppStore, and then in the U.S., taking first place on the platform. At the top of the rating the game lasted as much as 275 days.
But there were difficulties with the transfer to other platforms. With the version for Google Play the problem of platform fragmentation appeared. That is, it was almost impossible to create a program that would work well for all devices on the Android operating system.
After the debut part of the series was followed by the next craft of the company – Angry Birds Seasons, dedicated to holidays and the seasons. Then there was a collaboration with the cartoon “Rio”. Then came “Magic” for owners of some smartphones running on rare operating systems like “Symbian” and “MeeGo”.
A little later, the imagination of the developers launched their birds into space in a game with the same prefix – “Space”. In it the birds went through a portal and changed the structure of their DNA, turning into space birds with superpowers. But it’s not all that easy, because the sneaky pigs stole the eggs again and escaped into space.