Kamppi Center hosts battle for Angry Birds title

Hand-held hit gets its first Finnish Champion

Jonas Koivula

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By Jussi Sippola
     
      The Finns are quite good at inventing gadgets and widgets, and even better at then developing means with which to compete with them - either for a national title or better still for the "World Championship": the celebrated sport of mobile-phone throwing should serve as a suitable example.
      Hence it should not come as any great surprise that last Saturday saw the finals in Helsinki of the Finnish Championships in playing Angry Birds, the smash hit hand-held game designed by Rovio for the iPhone and other smartphone platforms.
     
For those who have managed to sleep through the irresistible rise of the Angry Birds apps phenomenon, the game is straightforward enough: using the touch screen of a smartphone or tablet computer, the player attempts to launch psychotic and very irate birds of different shapes, colours, and properties via a slingshot such that they knock down obstacles and terminate green pigs that have allegedly earlier stolen their eggs.
      There. That wasn't so difficult, was it?
     
This simple but immensely addictive little game has brought Rovio a good bit of money and international fame, and at the last count, the Angry Birds application has been downloaded to something like 100 million mobile devices worldwide.
      "It is so simple, and that is the reason it gets its hooks into you. It is also so simple that anyone can play it" is the analysis of Jonas Koivula, 19, who became Finland's first Angry Birds Champion on Saturday.
     
Koivula was crowned at the finals of a competition arranged by Nokia that began with regional heats a couple of weeks ago. A total of around 2,600 people took part, and it all came down to a knock-out final among 32 contestants, with the youngest only six years of age.
      Koivula allegedly only took up the game for the first time around a month back, and on Saturday he decided he would travel to the capital from his home in Raisio (near Turku) to try his luck with the best in the land.
      It paid off, as the young man won himself a trip for two to Hollywood and a couple of new Nokia N8 mobile phones for his dexterity in firing the birds at the pigs' strongholds.
     
Ilmari Lehtonen, who was narrowly beaten by Koivula in the grand final shoot-off, is a veteran of the game, having played it for the best part of a year.
      He, too, sees the secret of the game's success and playability in its extreme simplicity.
      "And it also makes good use of the touchscreen properties of a mobile handset", Lehtonen says.
      On big video screens set up in the Kamppi Center shopping mall in downtown Helsinki, a crowd of around a hundred people watched the finalists furiously swiping their 3.5" touch screens and hurling the birds at their sworn enemies.
     
     
FACTFILE: Finnish game has sold in the tens of millions
     
The Finnish game developers Rovio launched Angry Birds on an unsuspecting world as an application for the Apple iPhone in December 2009.
     
The game is also available for other platforms, such as Maemo (Nokia N900), Palm webOS, Android, Symbian3, PSP/PlayStation 3, Windows (XP and 7), and Mac OS X, and has morphed from being a handset-only game into something that can be played on a PC or game console.
     
Pay versions and versions with built-in advertisements have been downloaded more than 75 million times, and Angry Birds has become the most-sold hand-held game. Total downloads are said to be in the region of 100 million, and this figure has doubled in the last three months alone.
     
Rovio has regularly issued updates - including Christmas and Halloween editions of the game - and the company has also attracted the interest of investors, with EUR 30 million being put into Rovio's coffers, some of it from Niklas Zennström, the founder of the Internet telephone service Skype.
     
As the brand diversifies, a board game version of Angry Birds is due in the spring, and there is talk of a movie. A few days ago, Rovio brought out a completely new edition of the game as a tie-in with the 20th Century Fox animated movie Rio.
     
A number of prominent people have confessed to their addiction. British Prime Minister David Cameron was an early adopter, and the American talk-show host Conan O'Brien, already popular in Finland for his professed likeness to President Tarja Halonen, has regularly puffed the game on his TV show, even creating a giant live-action version with beachball birds launched at pigs lurking among [Swedish] Ikea furniture.
     
     
Helsingin Sanomat / Adapted from an article first published in print 27.3.2011
     


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Angry Birds resurface in Rio (23.3.2011)
  Skype founder invests in Angry Birds game (11.3.2011)
  Be very afraid, pigs - Rovio´s Angry Birds aren´t finished with you yet (9.11.2010)

Links:
  TeamCoCo: Conan O´Brien tries his hand at launching Angry Birds
  Angry Birds Sees 100 Million Downloads (Gamasutra)
  Angry Birds (Wikipedia)
  Rovio

JUSSI SIPPOLA / Helsingin Sanomat
jussi.sippola@hs.fi