E-commerce got Game

The game isn't complex. You fling the hapless birds at an angle from a catapult, a slingshot topple the enemy base which is manned by fat little green pigs. Would you say brilliant?

"With a combined 350 million downloads across all platforms and including both regular and special editions, the game, someone wrote on wikipedia, has been called 'one of the most mainstream games out right now.'"

We now dread to look out the window to see what mainstream has become. But, soft! Someone else has also written, and the wiki writer quotes, that it is "the largest mobile app success the world has seen so far." That's it, we're no longer venturing out of the house.

Who's to say then that Angry Birds-yes, that's the name-is not brilliant. Pocket Gamer's Keith Andrew has said Angry Birds is "a nugget of puzzling purity dished out with relish aplenty."

There's blurbs aplenty, too, on the maker's e-commerce site, rovio.com. "Challenging physics-based castle demolition." Well, you can lob the little guy, or send him out on a flat spin, and he lands in an explosion (get it?) of plucked feathers. "Each of the 120 levels requires logic, skill, and brute force to crush the enemy." I can tell you now, people, Warcraft this is not.

You wonder what the maker's mindset was when he designed the game. Hhmmm, rockets and cannon balls are so last century. We must try something new. Oh oh I know! We can use birds! We can use them to hit stone buildings! (Pause) And then, we will rake in $70 million, bird by bird, a dollar here, a dollar there.

And that's doing it the hard way in the fabulous storied age of e-commerce. Angry Birds reportedly cost rovio.com $147,000 to make. David Cole of DFC Intelligence says those "simple games that become big hits are definitely the most profitable in the industry."

But Cole adds, "Tetris is probably the biggest hit-it cost essentially zero to develop and continues to make money after 20+ years."

Yeah. We would be angry, too.