15 Years Ago, A Game You Can Play With One Finger Changed Mobile Forever

Toward the end of the 2000s, mobile gaming had taken a new shape. After years of being a mostly neglected added distraction for the Java era, Apple would change the game quite literally with the launch of the App Store in July 2008. So long as iOS users had access to the internet, they had access to thousands of applications that took advantage of the iPhone’s then-impressive and novelty features like its touch screen, accelerometors, and microphones.

There was a ton of very dumb apps most iPod Touch and iPhone users tried. Dedicated programs to fake glasses of beer, countless soundboards reference fan-favorite movies, fart buttons, and more. Among the novelty however were some early gems. SimCity and Peggle proved established game series could work on iPhone so long as it was done with care. More original, simplistic titles like Zombieville USA and Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor showed a promising start to the new platform's burgeoning indie scene.

But none of these early hits has success comparable to the biggest dog — uh, bird of them all. In December 2009, Rovio’s Angry Birds moved the goalpost for the kind of success a mobile game could have. And 15 years later, the media empire that still exists today is evidence of its impact on gaming.

Angry Birds is a simple physics-based puzzle game about flinging little avian characters into destructible structures in hopes of destroying evil green pigs. It’s an outlandish premise that was par the course of most mobile games of the time. But simple enough to explain to the most casual of audiences.

Its easy-to-understand premise was paired with an even simpler control scheme. The entire game could be played with a single finger. Swipe to pull the bird back on its slingshot, adjust your aim, and release. Further depth came in the form of a second tap depending on the bird at hand. Black birds exploded with a second touch of the screen, while yellow ones would zoom forward with force wherever players touched. Eight birds in total, each with a distinct personality, Angry Birds was an addicting, satisfying, and easily identifiable little game. Having a 99-cent price point also made the barrier to entry virtually non-existent.

It was the biggest video game around. In 10 months, the game sold over 12 million copies. Rovio wisely updated the game with new levels always giving people a reason to come back (live service before it was cool). By mid-2012, the Angry Birds series surpassed one billion downloads across all platforms.

It made Finnish studio Rovio, which was on the brink of bankruptcy before Angry Birds’ release, one of the country’s biggest companies practically overnight. The studio was able to parley that near-ubiquitous popularity into an unprecedented media empire. It included merchandise, comic books, spin-off games like the excellent Bad Piggies (seriously, it might be better than Angry Birds), a successful TV show, toys and plushies, and two successful feature-length films. And those films weren’t second-rate slop pumped out to capitalize on the craze, but actual, decent kids movies with an all-star voice cast.

There were mobile hits before Angry Birds. Bejeweled and dozens of Tetris ports did well in the flip-phone Java era. Even among its contemporaries, innovative titles like Cut The Rope, Temple Run, and Fruit Ninja became huge successes in their own right. But none of them had the cultural staying power and brand recognition on the level of Angry Birds.

In the late 2000s, when mobile games first broke through the glass ceiling of the flip-phone era, many analysts predicted that the mobile market could take over traditional games. While that outright takeover has yet to come to fruition, it’s well-documented that it’s pretty darn to that threshold.

There have been a ton of reason for this shift (the increased technical power of cellphones, developers learning to design for smartphone, Flappy Bird). But in many ways, Angry Birds, with its charming cast of sassy characters, zany premise, and simple gameplay, is the spark that got casual audiences of all ages to pay attention. With an audience obsessed with these weird little guys, the games industry followed the money.

“Angry Birds was one of the first truly famous intellectual properties to be mobile-first,” Apptopia's vice president for insights and global alliances told GameIndustry.biz in 2019. “This showed the promise of mobile in that it was able to penetrate everyday life.”

It might not be the best mobile game. Or the best game in the series. But Angry Birds is pretty definitively one of the most important mobile games ever made.