Angry Birds (series)

Angry Birds is a video game franchise created by Finnish computer game developer Rovio Entertainment. Inspired by Crush the Castle, the first game in the series was initially released in December 2009 for Apple iOS. As of October 2010, 12 million copies of the game were purchased from App Store. The company then released ports of the game for other touchscreen smartphone operating systems, including Android, Symbian and Windows Phone. The franchise has since been expanded to include video game console and PC ports.

Angry Birds has been praised for its successful combination of addictive gameplay, comical style, and low price. Its popularity led to many spin-offs, versions of Angry Birds being created for PCs and gaming consoles, a market for merchandise featuring its characters, a televised cartoon series, and an upcoming feature film. In January 2014 there had been over two billion downloads across all platforms, including both regular and special editions: as of July 2015, the series’ games have been downloaded more than three billion times collectively, making it the most downloaded freemium game series of all time. The original Angry Birds has been called "one of the most mainstream games out right now", "one of the great runaway hits of 2010", and "the largest mobile app success the world has seen so far". An animated feature film based on the series will be released by Columbia Pictures on May 20, 2016, and the first main-series sequel, Angry Birds 2, was released on July 30, 2015.

Overview
Angry Birds games consist of birds who need to be flinged on a slingshot in order to defeat pigs on in a structure or tower. There are 10 birds in the original game, which are Red, a red bird, Chuck, a canary who can destroy wooden blocks and planks, Jay, Jake, and Jim - three small blue birds who can destroy glass very well, Bomb, a black bird who can explode and cause significant damage to structures and stone, Matilda, a chicken who can lay an exploding egg, Hal, a Boomerang Bird, who can be flinged all the way to the back and come back like a boomerang, Terence, a huge red bird who is commonly assumed to be Red's big brother, who is a large bird who can do lots of damage, Bubbles, a cute little orange bird who can inflate into a huge size, Stella, a pink bird whose bubbles could make some blocks and materials fly, and finally the Mighty Eagle, a large majestic bald eagle who clears the screen of pigs and could destroy the entire structure. The birds' enemies are green pigs, who are, Minion Pigs, clueless dumb pigs who are the most common pig in the game, Corporal Pig, a strict pig who commands the clueless minion piggies into doing things, a Mustache Pig, or a Foreman Pig, who is notable for his long orange mustache, and King Smoothcheeks, better known as King Pig, who is encountered at the end of each episode and the main antagonist of the Angry Birds Series. However in Angry Birds Rio there are no pigs and are instead Marmosets and Nigel.

History
In early 2009, Rovio staff 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. 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, 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 the large number of configurations of device types and versions of the Android software. The number of combinations of software version, 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 incorporate 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 Halloween, which later developed into Angry Birds Seasons, 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.

Characters
The protagonists of the games are wingless birds. The most well-known of them is Red. They are collectively known together as the Flock.

A list of birds in the games: There are also Mighty Creatures, which can destroy levels.