We all know how popular Angry Birds is, but it’s always fun to put a number to the ridiculousness. The Angry Birds franchise (the original, Seasons, Rio, and Space combined) has just passed a whopping 1 billion downloads. (Official Rovio statement.) To put this incredible number into context, let’s include a few notes. First, Apple announced in March that the iOS AppStore just passed 25 billion downloads. Angry Birds is a single app (well technically four apps, but still). Also, we posted on 2 November that Angry Birds reached half-a-billion downloads and included some mind-boggling statistics in that post. But this also means that, in the past 189 days, the franchise was downloaded more than 2.6 million times per day! Hats-off to Rovio on their incredible feat.
But, that’s not all.
At the end of the video Rovio teases a new game that is not Angry Birds. Bird Leader checking in now. I noticed that this “new game” looks eerily similar one of my kids other favorite games, “Casey’s Contraptions”. I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure it’s not Cut the Rope or something brand new like others are speculating. Well, I guess it could be brand new game play. If this turns out to be true it’s actually kind of funny because I contacted the developers of Casey’s Contraptions about a year ago to tell them how much my kids like their awesome game (and that they should promote it on ABN). Again, I may be wrong (I wasn’t — see the update below), but above is a side by side comparison, so you can decide for yourself. The image on the left is a screenshot from the Apple App Store and the one on the right is a screenshot taken from the video above.
Updates!
May 11th, 2012
We now know the official name of the new game will be Amazing Alex. The website is AmazingAlex.com and you can also follow them on Twitter and Facebook.
May 10th, 2012
Rovio has confirmed that it has purchased Casey’s Contraptions! It has been removed from the AppStore while Rovio redesigns and revamps the app, though exactly what they plan on doing remains a mystery. The initial relaunch window is this summer on iOS and Android, then “extending to further platforms rapidly after that”.
For those not familiar, Casey’s Contraptions actually has some really neat game play and functionality. It is a child-friendly app that uses a lot of Rube Goldberg machines, demonstrating the concept of chain reactions for youngsters. It also has an awesome level builder, where you can design and share your own levels. You can also download levels (for free) that other people have created and shared. For a long time we’ve wish this existed in Angry Birds. Well, now they own a game that has this baked in. Does this mean we’ll soon have the ability to create and share our own Angry Birds levels? I for one think so… eventually.
