Angry Birds turns casual mobile play into a household habit

What happened

The whole game is one gesture. Pull back a slingshot, let go, watch a bird arc into a structure and knock it down. A player understands it before being told anything, a level takes under a minute, and failure costs nothing but another try. That shape suited the way phones are actually used, in short gaps during a commute or a queue, and it did not require the sustained attention that console and computer games assume.

Rovio had made many games before this one without much success, and the breakthrough owed as much to persistence and to being featured prominently in the store as to the design itself. Downloads reached hundreds of millions across phones and tablets. The characters left the screen quickly: plush toys, board games, breakfast cereal, theme park attractions and eventually animated films, an expansion into merchandising that few software companies had ever attempted.

Its commercial afterlife illustrates the mobile market's harshness as clearly as its opportunity. Sequels, spin-offs and reworkings arrived steadily, the audience drifted toward newer things, and Rovio spent years trying to repeat a result that had depended partly on timing. The company listed its shares publicly, restructured more than once, and eventually changed owners. Being enormously popular on phones turned out to guarantee very little about the year after, a pattern that has repeated with almost every mobile phenomenon since.

The world at the time

Apple's store had been open for about eighteen months and was filling rapidly with cheap software from small teams, most of it invisible. Touch screens were still new to most buyers. The dominant question in mobile games was whether anyone could build a lasting business at prices measured in single dollars.

What it changed

Publishers poured money into mobile development, and the free version supported by advertising became the standard way to reach the largest possible audience. The success also drew traditional companies onto phones, including, eventually, the most reluctant of them. Rovio's later struggles became a standard warning about how quickly attention moves on.