Angry Birds Go!

» see angrybirds.com/games/angry-birds-go as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Rovio wanted a kart racer and did not build it in house. Exient, the studio that had handled the console versions of the Angry Birds games, got the job and had never made a racer before. Angry Birds Go! came out free on 11 December 2013 for iOS and Android, with BlackBerry 10 and Windows Phone builds after that, and every race ran downhill: you steered and gravity did the rest. Hasbro sold physical Telepods karts with a scannable base that dropped the character into the game.

The press liked the driving and hated the economy around it. Karts were upgraded with currency collected during races, and a kart below a certain power level could not enter the next event at all. Characters got tired after five uses and had to either sit out or be refilled with crystals. The Verge ran its review under a headline about free-to-play ruining the Mario Kart of mobile. Metacritic settled at 60, IGN gave it a 5, and the complaint underneath almost every score was that the game had been designed around the purchase rather than the race.

None of that stopped it. It passed 100 million downloads by November 2014 and 130 million in total, a number most studios never touch once. Rovio kept shipping content for two more years: multiplayer in July 2014, local multiplayer races in April 2015, and in July 2015 an update that put Ayrton Senna in the game as a driver, played by the yellow bird in a helmet.

~ the case file ~

~ the upgrade counter ~

What the game is remembered for is a tuning decision. The karts had power levels, the events had power requirements, and the gap between the two was the product. Everything that followed from that, the energy that ran out after five runs and the crystals that topped it back up, was there to turn a thirty second downhill race into a schedule.

Angry Birds proper was on nearly every phone I saw in Turkey around 2011 and 2012, including phones belonging to people who did not otherwise play anything. The spinoffs never inherited that. By the time Go! arrived the series had stopped being a thing I installed, and what lasted here was the merchandise rather than the apps: Angry Birds plush was still on shelves in Ankara long after the games stopped being updated.

~ the summer it disappeared ~

In 2019 Rovio took every Angry Birds game released before 2014 off the stores. Go! went out alongside Seasons and the original. There was no announcement, no press release and no date anybody recorded at the time, which is why its death is dated to a season rather than a day: players watched the listings vanish across the summer and Rovio's line was that the removals were for testing. Two years later the company published an open letter explaining that the old apps had fallen too far behind platform requirements to keep current.

~ the turbo edition footnote ~

There was one more version, and it reads like a correction. In August 2019, the same summer the original was being pulled, a cloud version called Angry Birds Go! Turbo Edition appeared on Hatch, Rovio's own streaming service. It had four player multiplayer instead of three against three, and it had no microtransactions whatsoever. Hatch closed on 31 December 2020 with a single line left on the website thanking people for using it.

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