Angry Birds

Photo: CC BY 2.0 by Melinda Seckington / Flickr

Angry Birds is a super popular phenomenon that keeps on expanding, so I figured I'd collect some interesting Angry Birds links to this post. For example, the latest news on the subject is that the playground equipment manufacturer Lappset starts making Angry Birds playground equipment.

The London Philharmonic Orchestra has played and recorded the Angry Birds main theme which can be listened to on Spotify. Shane Parker has drawn the birds in a real retro ornithology book fashion. People are crocheting Angry Birds like crazy. There has been an attempt to negotiate peace between the birds and the pigs.

A couple of professional footballers, Lassi Hurskainen and Dan Jackson, created a real life Angry Birds video. That's some accurate kicking! Conan O'Brien has also played a live action version of Angry Birds a couple of times. :)

MauroNewMedia has written a quite extensive analysis on the reasons that Angry Birds has become so successful. This includes, of course, "simple yet engaging interaction concept" but also more complex concepts such as the way the game deals with the user's short-term memory management. The Wall Street Journal's Matt Ridley also analyzed the game a bit and figured that people just like predicting parabolic trajectories. The early Homo Sapiens, for example, basically relied on this exact skill when killing mammoths and other animals by throwing spears and rocks.

Finally, you can play the basic Angry Birds or the Fazer Tyrkisk Peber Volcano special levels in your browser. :) You might also want to follow the Angry Birds on Twitter.