Mobile Gaming - How Angry Birds is a Successful Copycat

Readers would probably be familiar with the popular mobile game Angry Birds, which was released in 2009. It was launched in December 2009 and has the nonsensical premise of launching bird projectiles onto green pigs who hang around in precarious structures made of wood, stone and other materials. What started as a simple mobile game soon expanded into multiple sequels and collaborations with popular movie franchises such as Star Wars and Rio. 

But the success of this game was built upon game mechanics which were a blatant rip-off of the pc flash game Crush The Castle, which has been released earlier in 2009. Here are two screenshots from the respective games to show you how similar they are. 

Crush the Castle

Angry Birds

Both games feature very similar mechanics, with the player tossing projectiles from the left side of the screen, to destroy buildings on the right side. However, the differences in the visuals, characters, and the fact that Angry Birds uses a giant slingshot while Crush the Castle uses a trebuchet (not pictured), make the game different enough that the creators of crush the castle don't seem too bothered about it. When interviewed about the success of Angry Birds in 2012, Daniel McNeely and Joey Betz agreed that while Angry Birds did have a very similar game mechanic, but they made sufficient changes that it wasn't a clone. McNeely even went on to say "And for the record, I think Angry Birds is a great game, I own Angry Birds, I play Angry Birds and they did an amazing job on taking you, you know, a concept, that we actually borrowed from someone, and improving upon it."

The full interview is embedded at the top. 

So at the end of the day, part of the success of Angry Birds was their ability to take an idea and repackage it into something that was fun and lighthearted. It's also easy to see that many users might not take to the macabre way that the human characters die in a spray of blood in the original Crush the Castle, as opposed to the more family-friendly way the green pigs "poof" when they get hit. It's also safe to say that Angry Birds entered the mobile market at the right time, and was able to cash in on the emerging number of people who owned smartphones and were glad to have a cute mobile game they could play on the go. 

By the way, if you're interested in checking out Crush the Castle, here's Crush the Castle 2. I personally found it harder to play compared to Angry Birds :/