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Happy Birthday Angry Birds! How was Rovio founded and what was the original idea behind Angry Birds? “It’s a little known fact that Rovio was started by a group of students - albeit under a different name - back in 2003. In fact, the Rovio company name didn’t come into being until 2005. By the time Angry Birds was created in 2009, the studio was downsizing, and after developing 51 games, they really needed something big if they wanted to keep the lights on. Luckily, this new game became somewhat of a hit... How did the company develop in the early years. Are there other franchises that have come out of Rovio at this time? The mobile gaming landscape was very different when Rovio got its start in 2003, which was 4 years before the iPhone launched, and 5 years before the App Store. Rovio was making games for very early mobile gaming platforms with some degree of success, but no breakout hits. This was due in part to the closed nature of early mobile game ecosystems. At that time games were created for a specific carrier’s app stores or for specific handsets as preinstalled software.You couldn’t just tell a friend about a game you were playing and assume they could find it on their device - something we take for granted nowadays. Of course everything changed with the release of the iPhone, which provided a more capable (and also touch-based) platform to develop for, and also a more universal ecosystem. That’s not to say that early Rovio games, like the atmospheric horror game Darkest Fear, didn’t have their fans, but it was really a convergence of universally appealing characters, satisfying gameplay, and technology that allowed Angry Birds to thrive. When did you begin to be involved with Angry Birds consumer products? Consumer products came into the picture pretty early after the initial success of Angry Birds. It was quite
unheard of at the time to have licensed products of an IP based on mobile gaming – it still is, but with the strength of the Angry Birds resting for a large part on its recognizable characters, it made sense to create those designs in physical form. The first licensed products were plush toys of the characters, and it just exploded from there to everything from soft drinks to shampoo to apparel. To date, over 1.8 billion Angry Birds consumer products have been sold. How do you keep the brand fresh after all these years? Well it’s important to note that in the context of mobile gaming, ten years is a very long time. But when we consider the entertainment industry and brands within it, you’re only just getting started after a decade, which is how we feel! But there are a couple ways we look to consistently refresh the brand. First there are Rovio’s games studios who create new engaging experiences for players through new mobile games like Angry Birds Dream Blast - with further Angry Birds games currently in development. More in the realm of licensed products, our style guides team is extremely talented when it comes to translating the Angry Birds attitude to fresh and trendy designs. The movies also continue to push the Angry Birds into new territories, and expose the brand to an even wider audience, people that may not play mobile games. Meanwhile, we continue to invest heavily in our Angry Birds YouTube channel, which has over 3 million subscribers and recently surpassed 4 billion lifetime views! Using this platform, we’ve released many different animation series that expand the appeal of the brand and its iconic characters. So in short, it’s about constantly offering a diverse range of media for our broad audience to engage with, capturing their attention in new and playful ways. What are your plans to celebrate your anniversary and
what plans do you have for the next few years? It’s going to be a wild year for the birds. We have the strongest content roadmap in our history. First, The Angry Birds Movie 2 is coming August 14, which is going to be phenomenal. This time around, the birds and pigs have to team up to take on a new enemy. Their relationship is still quite shaky so there are plenty of opportunities for comedic moments based on the friction between these two former rivals. We will see in the film whether they can keep it together long enough to defeat this new threat. Either way, it’s going to be a lot of hilarious fun. After the movie, we have planned a campaign in celebration of the 10th anniversary in December, more details on this will follow very soon, but for licensing activities, we are drawing on just how much the Angry Birds characters have evolved in the last 10 years. Our team has created two fantastic style guides around this theme to share with licensing partners, one aimed at premium partners, and the other designed for kids and young adults. The celebration continues into the following year with the premiere of our first ever long format animated series, a number of live touring shows, and a new unscripted television competition show. Through all of this, our new AR companion app, Angry Birds Explore, will act as a hub between fans and our hundreds of millions of licensed products out in the wild. By scanning codes on Angry Birds products, fans can discover immersive augmented reality experiences from fun AR mini-games, to face-altering camera filters, and an AR art studio. We’re super excited for the following year, and we’re looking forward to seeing the reactions our fans will have to everything that we are cooking up to celebrate The Angry Birds Movie 2 as well as the 10th anniversary of Angry Birds. This is by no means an extensive list so the following months will have their fair share of surprises as well!
With Angry Birds celebrating their tenth anniversary this year, Total Licensing talked to Simo Hämäläinen, SVP, Brand Licensing at Rovio, to find out more.
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