A closer look
Finnish studio Rovio Entertainment developed fifty-one consecutive commercial failures and was teetering on the edge of complete bankruptcy before finally striking gold with Angry Birds in 2009. The entire concept was based on a single crude sketch of a grumpy, wingless bird drawn by a designer, which the team inexplicably loved enough to build a physics puzzle game around. They added green pigs as the villains simply because the swine flu epidemic was dominating the news cycle at the time, making pigs the most topical enemies available. It is astonishing that a billion-dollar empire spanning movies, merchandise, and theme parks was salvaged from the brink of financial ruin by aggressively flinging spherical poultry at sick farm animals!
