Angry Birds (series)

Angry Birds is a Finnish video game franchise created and owned by company Rovio Entertainment. Inspired by the Flash game Crush the Castle, the franchise started in late 2009 with the release of Angry Birds for iOS, and later for Android and Symbian devices. Its unexpected success saved Rovio from bankruptcy, and predicted the release of many other video games, most of them produced by Rovio themselves, to this day.

Angry Birds stars a flock of exceptionally rare birds- the Angry Birds- inhabiting Piggy Island. Their main task is to protect the three eggs from the Piggy kingdom, a monarchy of green-colored pigs, governed by King Pig Smooth Cheeks.

The Angry Birds franchise has been incredibly successful since the release of the original Angry Birds; in early 2018, the series had a combined tally of over four billion downloads (over one billion of them being from the original game alone ) across all platforms. The success of the first game led to the production of more games, alongside shows, comics, and films.

Overview
The main Angry Birds series takes place on earth, a fictitious representation of the planet of the same name. The earliest backstory for the franchise takes place on the fictional Piggy Island, where a flock of rare birds, known as the Angry Birds, protect three eggs. The Angry Birds (specially their de facto leader, Red) take their duty very seriously, as they think that those eggs will eventually hatch and bring peace to the island. However, their eggs are constantly stolen by the Piggy kingdom, a political faction composed on pigs, whose monarch, King Pig Smooth Cheeks, seeks to eat them due to the ancient laws that force all monarchs to eat eggs at least one time in their life. To retrieve their eggs back, the Angry Birds use a slingshot to be launched and destroy the pigs' buildings.

The Angry Birds Movie, a film released in 2016, expanded the lore of the franchise. Now taking place on Bird Island, a society of birds lived peacefully following a series of rules, one of them prohibiting them from getting angry. One of the members of said society, Red, who was a hostile, short-tempered bird, was eventually forced by law to attend Matilda's anger management classes after an incident involving a birthday party. There, he met Chuck, Bomb, and Terence, with him ignoring them. Eventually, Bird Island was visited by society of pigs from Piggy Island, claiming themselves to be innocent and solidary people who wanted to stay on Bird Island. The birds society accepted their stay and quickly gained their trust. However, Red remained skeptical about the pigs and their leader, Leonard. Inspired by the heroism of the retired Mighty Eagle, he, Chuck and Bomb went for his help, only for the eagle to refuse, dissappointing Red. Then, the birds discovered that the pigs were distracting the other birds with a party while they stole all the eggs and bombed the island. The next day, Red led the birds to Piggy Island, where they managed to destroy Pig City, the home city of the pigs, and get the eggs back.

Most of the earliest Angry Birds games followed a fairly basic, casual, puzzle-styled gameplay, with the player having a small set of birds to launch with a slingshot to destroy the buildings in the levels and pop all the pigs inside. To launch the birds, the player has to drag their finger onto the bird on the slingshot and move it to aim. Releasing the finger would result in the bird being launched, and the next bird would hop onto the slingshot, waiting for them to get launched. The birds have different abilities, and some might be effective at destroying certain materials than the others. If the player runs out of birds without popping all the pigs in the level, they will get a "Level Failed" screen showing a pig laughing at them. On the other side, managing to pop all the pigs would result in the player completing the level, getting a bonus score of 10.000 for each unlaunched bird. Then, they will pass to the result screen, getting one, two, or three stars depending on the score received. They wil also be given the option to pass to the next level, go to the main menu, or restart the level. Most of these games also got limited Power-Ups as time progressed. These Power-Ups gave the player an advantage to complete the levels with more ease should they get stuck.

History
In early 2009, the staff of the broke company Rovio Entertainment Corporation began reviewing proposals for potential games. One such proposal came from senior game designer Jaakko Iisalo in the form of a simulated screenshot featuring some angry-looking birds with no visible legs or wings called "Birds!". While the picture gave no clue as to what type of game was being played, the staff liked the characters, and the team elected to design a game around them. In early 2009, physics games, such as Crush the Castle, were popular flash-based web games, so the Rovio team was inspired by these games. During the development of Angry Birds, the staff realized the birds needed an enemy. At the time, the "swine flu" epidemic was in the news, so the staff made the birds' enemies pigs. Angry Birds was the studio's 52nd produced game and on its initial release, the game didn't sell many copies. After Angry Birds was a featured app on the UK App Store in February 2010 and quickly reached No.1 there, it reached the No. 1 spot on the paid apps chart in the US App Store in the middle of 2010 and then stayed there for 275 days. The initial cost to develop Angry Birds was estimated to exceed €100,000 ($113,724.90), not including costs for the subsequent updates. For the iOS version, Rovio partnered with distributor Chillingo to publish the game to the App Store. Chillingo claimed to have participated in final game polishing, such as adding visible trajectory lines, pinch to zoom, pigs' grunts, birds' somersaults on landing. Since then Rovio has self-published almost all of the later ports of the game, with the exception of the PSP version, which was produced under license by Abstraction Games.

When Rovio began writing new versions of the game for other devices, new issues came to light. As the team began working on a version for Android systems, they observed a large number of configurations of device types and versions of the Android software. The number of combinations of software versions, processor speed, and even user interfaces was significantly larger than that for the iOS version. Ultimately, the team settled on a minimum set of requirements, even though that left nearly 30 types of Android phones unable to run the game, including some newly released phones. It was released on October 15, 2010. One month after the initial release on Android, Rovio Entertainment began designing a lite version of the game for these other devices.

In early 2010, Rovio began developing a version of Angry Birds for Facebook. The project became one of the company's largest, with development taking over a year. The company understood the challenges of transplanting a game concept between social platforms and mobile/gaming systems. In a March 2011 interview, Rovio's Peter Vesterbacka said, "you can’t take an experience that works in one environment and one ecosystem and force-feed it onto another. It's like Zynga. They can’t just take FarmVille and throw it on mobile and see what sticks. The titles that have been successful for them on mobile are the ones they’ve built from the ground up for the platform." The Facebook version incorporates social-gaming concepts and in-game purchases and entered beta-testing in April 2011; the game became officially available on Facebook in February 2012.

Improvements for the game include the ability to synchronize the player's progress across multiple devices; for example, a player who completes a level on an Android phone can log into their copy of the game on an Android tablet and see the same statistics and level of progress. Later games were released like Angry Birds Seasons, which was originally Angry Birds Halloween, Angry Birds Space, a game which takes place in space and introduces a new bird called the Ice Bird; Angry Birds Star Wars and Angry Birds Star Wars II, which are based off the popular Star Wars film series, Angry Birds Go!, a racing game, Angry Birds Epic, an role-playing game where birds actually kill pigs, and other games as well. Eventually, a sequel to the main game was released that was called Angry Birds Under Pigstruction, which is now called Angry Birds 2.

Media
Rovio is investigating ways to expand the Angry Birds brand, including merchandise, television shows, and movies. Mikael Hed, CEO of Rovio Mobile, has envisioned a feature film in the stop-motion animation style of Aardman Animations. To that end, Rovio has purchased a Helsinki-based animation studio to prepare Angry Birds short cartoons on the Nicktoons station's Nickelodeon Extra, the first of which was a Christmas special named "Wreck the Halls" that debuted in December 2011. Hed acknowledges that such a film would be years away and that Rovio must keep the characters relevant until then, by producing sequels or new ports of the original game.

Television adaptation
Angry Birds Toons, a TV series based on the game, made its debut on March 16, 2013. Angry Birds Toons is released through third-party video distribution platforms, including Comcast's Xfinity On-Demand in the US, Samsung Smart TVs, and Roku set-top boxes. It is also available in a number of countries on traditional television broadcasts. Angry Birds Toons is available on mobile devices by an additional Angry Birds Toons channel on all of the Angry Birds apps homescreens. The DVD versions for the TV series was released by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. The series has a total of 3 seasons.

On April 11, 2014, Rovio released Piggy Tales, a stop motion animated series. It tells the stories of the Minion Pigs' life.

On November 1, 2014, Rovio released Angry Birds Stella, a 2D/3D animated series based on the game of the same name, telling the stories of Stella's life and that of her friends on their own island.

On March 10, 2017, Rovio released Angry Birds Blues, a computer-animated series based on The Angry Birds Movie. It shows the lives of the Blues having fun, while the Hatchlings do random stuff and ruin their plans.

On June 9, 2018, Angry Birds BirLd Cup series was released. The series was released on YouTube.

On November 17, 2018, Angry Birds on the Run was released. The series was released on YouTube.

Film adaptation
A 3D computer-animated film adaptation, The Angry Birds Movie, was released on May 20, 2016, which fully anthropomorphizes the characters for the first time in franchise history, giving them limbs and voices.

The sequel, The Angry Birds Movie 2, was released on August 13, 2019.

Comic adaptation
Angry Birds has been adapted into a lot of comics, see them here.

Merchandise
Angry Birds has its own cookbook, named Bad Piggies' Egg Recipes. Unlike the game, which focused on the birds, the cookbook focuses on the pigs and the dishes they could make using the eggs.

In November 2013, Indian brand Parle started a marketing campaign in which a trading card is included in each packet of Parle's Wafers and it included a related contest to win Angry Birds merchandise.

In June 2016, Kurkure India started an offer to win daily themed prizes and a trip to Angry Birds Activity Park in Johor Bahru, Malaysia.

Trivia

 * The most notable toys made by Angry Birds are the Telepods, created by Hasbro. These figures were created for Angry Birds Star Wars II, Angry Birds Go!, Angry Birds Stella, and Angry Birds Transformers. These are figures used to "teleport" a character of the corresponding figure into the game by scanning it, via the device's camera. Telepods figures are not only for this use but can also be used with the toy set that comes with the toy, like other Angry Birds board games.
 * The Angry Birds characters have been referenced in television programs throughout the world. The Israeli comedy show Eretz Nehederet (trans: A Wonderful Country), one of the nation's most popular TV programs, satirized recent failed Israeli-Palestinian peace attempts by featuring the flock attempting to do a peace treaty with the Pigs.
 * Kimi Räikkönen has an Ice Bird logo from Angry Birds Space on his cap. KRICEBIRD.jpg)]]
 * Angry Birds has teamed up with the Lotus F1 Team for the upcoming 2012 Monaco Grand Prix, with its logo on the top of each Lotus Renault F1 car's nosecone, as well as a promotional web-based version of Angry Birds in honor of Kovalainen.
 * An Angry Birds Friends! tournament was released for this, the Lotus F1 Tournament (Also sponsoring Angry Birds Star Wars) and Lotus F1 Team Tournament.
 * Hockey Bird, a hockey-playing bird, was the official mascot of the 2012 IIHF Ice Hockey World Championships. It was designed by Toni Kysenius and Rovio Entertainment. He was playable in the NHL All-Star Tournament.
 * In June 2013, Rovio and NASA opened an Angry Birds Space-themed park at the Kennedy Space Center titled "Angry Birds Space Encounter". It features various experiences to the Angry Birds Space video game, such as creating characters and shooting birds at pigs. The attraction was also opened in the Space Center Houston.
 * Rovio created a contest with the prize Angry Birds: Hatching a Universe, a book about the franchise and all the characters.
 * Angry Birds has lots of rip-offs, knock-offs, bootlegs, and parodies; all of them are included here.
 * Angry Animals
 * Angry Birds Famicom (also known as Angry Bird 3, according to this page) (a pirated NES game created by the Nice Code developers)
 * Angry Birds Heroic Rescue
 * Angry Brains
 * Angry Dews (MLG Parody Game)
 * Angry Ducks
 * Angry Farm
 * Angry Frogs
 * Angry Fruits
 * Angry Pigs
 * Angry Penguins
 * Angry Pussy Cats (commonly known as Angry Purrs)
 * Angry Swamp ChootEm
 * Angry Tomatoes
 * Angry Turds
 * Beaver's Revenge
 * Beavers Strike Back
 * Birds Hunter
 * Birds vs. Zombies
 * Brutal Frogs
 * Bunny Shooter
 * Cannon Bird
 * Chicks’n’Vixens
 * Coco Loco (a game published by Chillingo)
 * Crazy Birds (Fake arcade game made in the Philippines)
 * Cut The Birds
 * Feed the Dragon
 * House of Mice
 * KFC - Snack! in the Face
 * Mad Birds
 * Moshling Boshling
 * Shark Dash