Angry Birds

Angry Birds is a Finnish action, puzzle, and strategy based media franchise created by Rovio Entertainment, and owned by Sega. The game series focuses on the eponymous flock of colorful angry birds who try to save their eggs from green-colored pigs. Inspired by the game 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, Angry Birds Toons, a televised animated series, and two films; The Angry Birds Movie and its sequel The Angry Birds Movie 2. By January 2014, there had been over 2 billion downloads across all platforms, including both regular and special editions. By July 2015, the series' games had been downloaded more than 3 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". The first main-series video game sequel, Angry Birds 2, was released on 30 July 2015. The first game in the series was initially released on 11 December 2009 for iOS. At the time, the 2009 swine flu epidemic was in the news, so the staff decided to use pigs as the enemies of the Angry Birds. The company released ports of the game to other touchscreen smartphone operating systems, including Android. In early 2019, all remaining Angry Birds games released before October 2014 (with the exception of Friends) were discontinued and removed from app stores, though Bad Piggies was added back in early 2020. Rovio has declined to explain their reasoning behind the decision apart from a brief tweet and support response, both giving different answers. However, in June 2021, by popular demand of the fans, Rovio announced that the classic games will be available on the stores again sometime in the future.