Not a week goes by that I don't hear about, see something related to, read a post about Angry Birds.
Angry Birds is a game originally developed for Apple products in 2009 by a Finnish game developer. Over the months and years, it practically became viral, becoming available to more and more devices and different operating systems. As of this year, it has been downloaded roughly 350 million times - it is a craze that rivals (or maybe even surpasses) the Plants vs. Zombies disease that swept the entire globe a year or so ago.
You hear college-age students talking about it, see children as young as 5 playing it and see middle-aged office workers posting photos of it over their FB. It has transcended and bridged age gaps and made a lot of people very, very wealthy.
In fact, Angry Birds merchandise is everywhere. The most common Angry Birds merch is the balloon sold by the ambulant peddler for about 10-15 pesos, give or take a few. The shirts are also very popular as the wide Angry Birds baller bands which I've seen National Bookstore sell. A few days ago, however, we were at Divisoria for supplies for a certain project of ours. What we saw astounded us. There were mugs, stickers, fans, figurines, shirts, caps, keychains, cellphone accessories and casings, bikes, towels, dresses, even underwear!
The Chinese, apparently, are very fond of catapulting birds at pigs because they had the bright idea of selling totally unrelated items with the Angry Birds image. But boy, were they clever! The merchandise were selling like pancakes. Millions of dollars must have been earned illegally just by the use of the Angry Birds image. That's how popular they are.
They are so popular that they've spawned an entire faniverse with fan fiction and fiction games. People have theorized on the origin time and again and attempted to reconcile or compare and contrast with other similar games.
Today, I saw an image that gave me a start. I don't really know who the original creator of this image is, but it is hosted in a multitude of webpages and even shared several times on Facebook. If this is the real origin of Angry Birds, I am ready to believe it.
Image taken from http://imgur.com/gallery/s7xb9
Now go buy yourself anything not angry or you might want to hit yourself. Your childhood memories down the drain.
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