You know the game, I know you know. Angry Birds. I have an attraction to games like this. You can play for just a little bit at a time (like that) and each time you shoot, you could get a slightly different result. Oh, you don't know Angry Birds? Well, the basic idea is that you launch these birds (which are apparently angry) with a sling shot. The goal is to knock over some pigs. Seriously, that is the game.

I was given a Peterson Field Guide to Birds when I was seven years old and snapped, I love birds, it\u2019s just the way I'm wired. Since 1997, I've made it my goal to get paid to go birding. I'm an international professional speaker and storyteller, wrote the books Disapproving Rabbits, City Birds/Country Birds and 1001 Secrets Every Birder Should Know and I'm #32 in the Geek A Week Trading Card set. I also work part-time as a National Park Ranger. When I'm not digiscoping or banding birds, I'm an award-winning beekeeper.

Angry Birds Download

But Angry Birds was sweeping that nation and as a die hard birder how could I not test it out? I waited until I didn't have hard deadlines and started playing it. The premise is that green pigs have stolen the birds' eggs and the birds launch an all out attack to annihilate the pigs. In turn, the pigs build elaborate forts and put on armor to guard against the furious birds hell bent on destruction. Kind of based in reality...wild boars would eat bird eggs if they found them...but I don't see any wild birds with the ability to explode and take down a fort of glass, rock and wood. You use a slingshot to launch the birds at the pigs and different birds have different abilities. Physics actually plays a part in the game as to how you launch the birds.

As I played the game, I tried to identify the birds. I wondered...what real birds are the Angry Birds based on? Here' my opinion, how does it compare with your thoughts on the id of the Angry Birds? Some are easy:

The Red Angry Bird is a Northern Cardinal--that's a total no brainer and makes sense. Having had more than one cardinal in my hand, that hard beak is no lie. They are truly angry birds and capable of nasty bites.

The Yellow Angry Bird is an American Goldfinch. In the game, it's special ability is to have sudden short bursts of speed. This would be something more suited to a Cooper's Hawk or Sharp-shinned Hawk but that's not as funny as tiny cute bird being angry and taking out big green pigs.

The Blue Angry Bird (that morphs into a flock of three birds when tapped) has been vexing me. It's tiny and all blue, so that makes me think Indigo Bunting...but that's the wrong shade of blue. Could it be a Mountain Bluebird? Or do we need to look at birds outside of North America and could it be an African Blue Flycatcher? It does have a slight crest and that is about the same color of blue. This bird's special ability is to break out into three birds when you tap the screen after launching it.

I think the Black Angry bird that explodes is based on a myna bird, most specifically, the Crested Myna. Look at the color scheme between the two. The Angry Birds version is more stylized but you can see the the little crest and the red and yellow. I think there might be some elements of the Common Hill Myna in there too. And that's a family of birds that always kind of looks angry anyway. Good thing the real life ones do not explode, it would make keeping them as pets incredibly dangerous.

The Green Angry Bird which acts like a boomerang in the game has got to be Emerald Toucanet, a bird that I've seen in Panama and Guatemala. Although, I didn't see actually do anything remotely boomerang like. But compared to the other birds in the game, it's smaller--like the toucanet and has a giant schnoz...or beak.

So those are my thoughts of the Angry Birds...how about you? Do you agree with the id? Incidentally, I linked to a trailer earlier for the movie Rio. Word from the producers is that an Angry Birds version of the birds in the movie will be coming so you can fling Spix Macaws, Red-crested Cardinals, Canaries and perhaps a Keel-billed Toucan. What really cool is that the game touches on the issue of illegal trapping for the pet bird trade. More awareness of that cannot be a bad thing.

On an island in the Pacific, the goal is to fling a squadron of kamikaze birds at gormless green pigs. The birds have just cause: the pigs stole their eggs. The swine took refuge in, and on, easily collapsible structures. The game is physics-based -- you adjust the trajectory and power of the slingshot with your finger -- and very, very addictive. Rovio, the Finnish developer behind the title, certainly got lucky. But Mikael and Niklas Hed, the cousins who run the company, also realised in early 2009 that the smartphone was about to become a new mass medium -- just one without the mass-media economics. So they methodically set out to create a new type of blockbuster, one with universal appeal, and use it to build an entertainment empire that would extend far beyond the iPhone. It would be Disney 2.0. "We set out to minimise the amount of luck that was needed," says Mikael Hed. "We felt we had done our best game so far. But the idea always was, this is the first step."

First they had to save a company in crisis: at the beginning of 2009, Rovio was close to bankruptcy. Then they had to create the perfect game, do every other little thing exactly right, and keep on doing it. The Heds had developed 51 titles before Angry Birds. 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. "We thought we would need to do ten to 15 titles until we got the right one," says 30-year-old Niklas. 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. He had pitched hundreds in the two months before. This one showed a cartoon flock of round birds, trudging along the ground, moving towards a pile of colourful blocks. They looked cross. "People saw this picture and it was just magical," says Niklas. 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. "She doesn't play any games. I realised: this is it."

The team started going through concepts. Jaakko Iisalo, Rovio's principal games designer, would pitch ten ideas at a time, working them up into screenshots. In March 2009, Iisalo struck gold. "There was something about those characters," says Mikael. "These birds have no feet and can't fly. And they're really angry. We all started thinking about why they are so angry. For such simple characters, they made us think so much. There was some magic to it."

At first the game was radically different from how we know it now: each coloured bird matched a coloured block; touch the block and the corresponding bird would fly up and destroy it. None of the birds had special abilities: instead, there were collectable eggs, which acted as power-ups. And you would keep and strengthen your own flock, as in Pokémon. Flinging the birds across the screen came later, but it was done by swiping your finger in the direction of the buildings, rather than with the catapult. The pigs were a later addition too: justification for the birds' wanton destruction of the buildings. They started out as featureless blobs; swine flu hit the news and they became sickly green pigs. But then test players consistently said they didn't understand why the docile-looking swine deserved such aggression, so the team came up with the back story of the pigs' stealing the birds' eggs.

Rovio realised that the old rules of distribution -- put a disk in a box, charge 50 for it and leave it there -- didn't apply. The company created an active, continuous relationship with the customer. It offered regular updates for nothing, to keep people playing and talking about the product: "Our game is a great way to communicate with the customer," Mikael says. The team resolved to answer every tweet and fan letter that came in. They incorporated levels designed by fans and discussed their ideas for new birds (among the suggestions: a phoenix bird that ignites the structure). "People felt that here's a gaming company that actually cares,"

In November 2010, Andrew Stalbow, then a vice president of Fox Digital Entertainment, approached Mikael. The film studio 20th Century Fox was planning the release of a brand new animated feature, called Rio. Perhaps they could collaborate. "It was a movie about birds," says Mikael. "It was a natural fit."

Angry Birds Rio, an entirely new game for the iOS platform. Wired played three of the levels in progress and found it to be business as usual. But the pigs are gone (replaced by hanging monkeys), the physics have been tweaked and new objects added, such as bouncy palm trees and working motors. Instead of popping pigs, you free captured rare birds from cages by bombarding them with your own flock -- more or less the plot of the film. But it's a big step for Rovio's entertainment empire. During halftime in this year's Superbowl -- where 30 seconds cost $3 million -- Angry Birds showed up in an ad spot for Rio. "It's a massive deal for us in the sense of visibility," says Heijari. "Rio is also taking it into the more storytellingoriented direction that we will want to do with future Angry Birds titles." This tightly controlled, incremental approach is how Rovio will extend its brand and, for Mikael, this was always the plan. "We always felt like the game was a brilliant way to get visibility for a brand, to build a huge audience for it. And that in turn will allow us to build a big business around that. This is the first step."

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