Niklas lived 45 minutes outside Helsinki. His father Kaj was an entrepreneur who founded several companies, including Trema, a financial-software business that was eventually sold to a private-equity house for $150 million in 2006. Mikael grew up in the coastal town of Vastaa and moved to Helsinki when he was seven. Mikael and Niklas had been thinking about video games for long before that.
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And it's only in the free category."īoth Heds know the value of patience: the overnight success ofĪngry Birds took eight years. "I know what we have coming up in the future, so I'm not too worried about it. The first time that Wired visits, a 14-year-old boy from Utah has knocked Angry Birds off the number-one spot with a game called Bubble Ball. Mikael has two young children, three and five, and in the midst of the Angry Birds frenzy last year decided to renovate his house. He speaks in a measured rhythm and takes questions patiently. He's four years older than Niklas and taller, with tidy brown hair. Mikael is the one who slows the other two down when their ideas and imaginations run ahead of them. He founded Rovio in 2003 and is in charge of production, but functions as the hinge between Vesterbacka and Mikael. Eight months and thousands of changes later, after nearly abandoning the project, Niklas watched his mother burn a Christmas turkey, distracted by playing the finished game. "People saw this picture and it was just magical," says Niklas. This one showed a cartoon flock of round birds, trudging along the ground, moving towards a pile of colourful blocks. He had pitched hundreds in the two months before. One afternoon in late March, in their offices overlooking a courtyard in downtown Helsinki, Jaakko Iisalo, a games designer who had been at Rovio since 2006, showed them a screenshot. "We thought we would need to do ten to 15 titles until we got the right one," says 30-year-old Niklas. Some of them had sold in the millions for third parties such as Namco and EA, so they decided to create their own, original intellectual property. The Heds had developed 51 titles before Angry Birds. Then they had to create the perfect game, do every other little thing exactly right, and keep on doing it. So do Paul Gascoigne and Salman Rushdie.įirst they had to save a company in crisis: at the beginning of 2009, Rovio was close to bankruptcy. David Cameron and Justin Bieber say they are fans. On the first anniversary of its release, 2,405 people in 756 cities worldwide wasted even more of their time holding events in celebration of " Angry Birds Day".
In total, the "brand" has taken more than €50 million: not bad for a game that cost €100,000 to make. In January, the trailer for the new Angry Birds Rio racked up 500,000 YouTube views in a weekend on official videos alone, Angry Birds has had 27 million total views. Sixty thousand Angry Birds soft toys have been sold.
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It went straight to the top of the new Mac App Store in January, selling 150,000 copies in its first week. It has filled billions of those interstitial moments spent riding the bus, on a plane or in important work meetings, and it is or has been the number-one paid app on iTunes in 68 countries, as well as the best-selling paid app of all time. Every day, users spend 200 million minutes - 16 years every hour - playing the mobile game. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.Īngry Birds is the first waste of 75 millions people's time that can be accurately quantified.
This article was taken from the April 2011 issue of Wired magazine.
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