Angry Birds (series)

Angry Birds is a video game franchise created by the Finnish company Rovio Entertainment. The series focuses on multi-colored birds which try to save their eggs from green-colored pigs, their enemies. Inspired by Crush the Castle, the game has been praised for its successful combination of fun gameplay, comical style, and low price. Its popularity led to many spin-offs, versions of Angry Birds created for PCs and video game consoles, a market for merchandise featuring its characters, a televised animated series, and a feature film. By January 2014, there were over two billion downloads across all platforms, including both regular and special editions. By July 2015, the series' games were 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 was released by Columbia Pictures on 20 May 2016, and the first main-series sequel, Angry Birds 2, was released on 30 July 2015.

The first game in the series was initially released in December 2009 for iOS. At the time, the swine flu epidemic was in the news, so the staff decided to use pigs as the enemies of the birds. The company released ports of the game to other touchscreen smartphone operating systems, including Android, Symbian, and Windows Phone, and PCs.

Overview
Angry Birds games consist of birds who need to be flung on a slingshot in order to defeat pigs on in a structure or tower. There are 10 birds in the original game, the first five that are named are the members of the original flock, which are Red, a red bird who is the leader of the flock, Jay, Jake, and Jim - three small blue birds who can destroy glass very well, Chuck, a canary who can destroy wooden blocks and planks and can accelerate to great speeds, 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 flung 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 (but actually not), who is a large bird who can do lots of damage when didn't speak, 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 is the last resort if the player fails the level which completely clears the screen of pigs and could destroy the entire structure, being summoned with a sardine. 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 pigs 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. In Angry Birds Space, the birds, except Matilda go to space and don space costumes. an Ice Bird is featured; which has the power to freeze pigs and items, and an egg as well. In Angry Birds Star Wars and Angry Birds Star Wars II, its sequel, the characters are dressed up as Star Wars characters and exclusives are added as well, reenacting the Star Wars film series. In Angry Birds Seasons, multiple new characters are introduced, for an example: Bubbles (originally) and Stella (originally). The only playable Seasons-exclusive-bird is Tony, Terence's cousin from Finland. Also, multiple holidays are celebrated. There are also other Mighty Creatures like the Mighty Dragon from Year of the Dragon (Angry Birds Seasons) - which is summoned by a Red Koi Fish, and the Space Eagle from Angry Birds Space - which is also summoned by a sardine.

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. 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 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.

Spin-Off Series
Angry Birds POP Blast

Cancelled
These games were soft-launched in select countries, but were discontinued after few months of its release.

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. DVD version 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 doing random stuff and ruining their plans.

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

On November 17, 2018, Angry Birds on the Run series were 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.

A sequel is scheduled to be released on August 13, 2019.

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