Angry Birds: An Android Icon

24.8.11 The Reporter 0 Comments

If there's any one game that's been canonized as an Android staple, it must be Angry Birds. Angry Birds may have been made available first on the iOS, but thanks to Google Chrome and the Android Market's free versions, not to mention the wholehearted support by the Google ecosystem, the Angry Birds game is now a Google Android icon.

What's not to love about the Angry Birds? Aside from a simple but compelling gameplay, the main aspect of Angry Birds that keeps a casual gamer coming back for more are the very things that compelled Rovio to build a game around its initial proposal: the characters.

During a game-concept bull session with the game developers, Senior Game Designer Jaakko Iisalo came up with sketches of wingless birds that looked like they needed Anger Management classes. At the time, they didn't know how gameplay would look like, just yet. But the birds were the centerpiece. Eventually, they settled on a petrary physics type of gameplay: tossing ammunition over to the enemy just like they would using catapults in Medieval times. Only, in Angry Birds, you toss the über-cute Angry Birds characters to the foes: originally, the sickly-green pigs.

The sickly-green pigs were inspired by the Swine Flu outbreak that was affecting many in the US at the time. So with cute Angry Birds and annoying sickly-green pigs duking it out on a green field, an addictive game was born.

What gets a player hooked on the Angry Birds, you ask? For some, it's the annoying-but-adorable snickers of the green pigs. Those snickers really compel you to obliterate them. For others, it's the physics aspect of the game. If you've gotten hooked onto Billiards because of the science behind aiming and hitting balls, there's no wonder you got hooked onto Angry Birds. Still, for others, the fact that the Angry Birds really look like they need Anger Management classes (along with the players themselves) that resonates with them. Maybe some players find a certain sense of vicarious release when they obliterate pig after pig in the game. Maybe they're projecting the characters of their real-life enemies on the pigs.

But these are suppositions. Even PCWorld's Jared Newman is just supposing that it's because the game is solid, that's why it keeps a player's attention. Either way, the stats are undeniable: Even back in 2010, iPhone users alone logged in 1 million hours of Angry Birds gameplay EVERY DAY. Seems like a whole bunch of people need rehab for Angry Birds addiction.