Rovio Entertainment has continued to support the Angry Birds series for many years. In fact, this year marks the 10th anniversary of Angry Birds 2. The team has wanted to celebrate in a big way by announcing Angry Birds 2 Space, a limited-time event and one of the game’s biggest to come along in years. The announcement came during Saturday night’s TwitchCon Block Party, which seems like an unusual setting for such a reveal. After speaking with some of the Rovio team, the reasoning becomes a little clearer.
On Friday after, I sat down with Rovio VP of Marketing Luis de la Camara, who noted that the stars aligned with both Angry Birds 2 and TwitchCon celebrating tenth anniversaries.
It’s a little bit synergistic and a little bit opportunistic. When we started this calendar year, we were thinking, ‘Okay, tenth year anniversary is this year for Angry Birds 2.’ We’ve wanted to bring Space for a long time. As I said, this is the first time in six years we’re actually adding new gameplay mechanics, true new gameplay mechanics into the core of the game… and then on top of that, we wanted to make sure we had a good marketing campaign around that, so that people could know about this.
We originally had already thought about mid-to-late October as a perfect moment to launch it. And then as we started to think about, ‘Okay, well, how do we actually sort of tie it to something really interesting?’ It turned out that TwitchCon is also having its tenth year anniversary and it was just like, ‘Wow, that’s just so perfect.’
So we quickly reached out to the folks at TwitchCon and we said, ‘Hey, we’d love to do something with you guys. We were thinking of doing a drone show. Would you be open to us doing a drone show at TwitchCon?’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, absolutely!’ And we looked at ways to collaborate and the and the block party just seemed like a perfect place to party with our fans, party with creators, and just have a great time celebrating ten years of Angry Birds 2, 10 years of TwitchCon, and and the release of the Space event.”
Angry Birds 2’s Space event will introduce a refined gravity and orbital mechanics that change up the standard formula. Look for weekly themed events across a new space biome that will take players across several different planets.
“We started talking about this at the beginning of this year,” de la Camara added. “What we were thinking about is it’s our tenth year and we need to do something really, really special. We haven’t brought brand new gameplay physics and mechanics for six years in Angry Birds 2, so it’s been a long time coming to bring something fresh and exciting.”
The Angry Birds 2 Space event will begin on Friday, October 24 and continue until Friday, November 21 on iOS and Android.
