“We got away from this carrier-dominated Soviet model,” he explained – before the App Store, the carriers were responsible for figuring out what software would run on their phones. “We really have Apple to thank,” said Vesterbacka – not just for helping to promote Angry Birds, but for creating the App Store to begin with. The game got a viral push when a popular skier told Swedish TV viewers that she played the game it then caught on through other European countries, caught the eye of American gamers, and eventually gained recognition from Apple, which featured it on the App Store.

Vesterbacka said that the game was first released in December, 2009, and was a hit in its home country of Finland.

“For us, the timing was really perfect, it was a perfect storm,” said Vesterbacka.īut even then, it wasn’t an immediate success. Rovio underestimated the time and cost it took to make Angry Birds, but Vesterbacka said in the end it was worth it – the added time and expense enabled the team to more thoroughly refine the game play experience. A team of 12 developers and designers put the game together in about eight months, he said. Rovio worked on Angry Birds in between the games it developed for other publishers.

“We did a lot of work for hire,” explained Vesterbacka. Angry Birds is actually the company’s 52nd title Rovio has been making games for mobile devices since 2003, long before the advent of the iPhone. Many people in the industry see Angry Birds as an overnight success from an obscure publisher, but Vesterbacka resoundingly rejected that observation. Rovio CEO Peter Vesterbacka spoke to a large crowd at this week’s Game Developer Conference (GDC) to explain his company’s success. Of the thousands of games available for download from the App Store, none has had the sustained popularity of Rovio’s Angry Birds, a 99 cent physics-based puzzler in which you use a slingshot to launch birds of various shapes and sizes at fortresses containing green pigs.

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