MEET THE DEVELOPER

How Angry Birds Hatched a Hit

Angry Birds Match 3

Cute Merge & Matching Puzzle!

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For eight years, we’ve gleefully catapulted those Angry Birds. But a new generation of offspring—the Hatchlings—is stealing the limelight from their parents...and melting hearts everywhere.

Introduced last year in the The Angry Birds Movie, these fluffy baby birds play a starring role in the new match-3-style puzzle game Angry Birds Match.

“We knew the Hatchlings were going to be a thing the first time we saw a prescreening of the [Angry Birds] movie,” says producer Teemu Hämäläinen of the Finnish developer Rovio. But there were hints of their greatness before that.

During the 2015 holidays, a video of the Hatchlings singing “Deck the Halls” went viral. “It demonstrated how much people connected with these characters,” says John Cohen, producer of The Angry Birds Movie.

The gameplay is not your typical Angry Birds catapulting.

That emotional connection was intentional. The creators wanted Angry Birds fans to “understand what is at stake when the safety of the birds’ eggs is threatened,” explains Cohen.

“The eggs are so important to the birds, and before the movie we didn’t really know what was inside of them,” says Cohen.

Thus the Hatchlings were born.

Early versions of Angry Birds Match had players collecting items to decorate the Hatchlings’ play areas, according to Marko Kalliokoski, the app’s art director and game designer.

But that made Angry Birds Match feel more like a building game and didn’t place enough emphasis on the characters.

So Rovio switched to having players acquire outfits to dress the Hatchlings in.

The inspiration?

“Some of us have Hatchlings of our own—you know, human children,” says Cohen. “Whenever we consider the Hatchlings as characters, we’re thinking about our own children and expressing the adorable things they do every day.”

This is especially true for Cohen. The beige Hatchling, Samantha, is voiced by his daughter.

As for their return to the big screen, keep an eye out for the next Angry Birds movie, arriving in 2019. “You can count on the Hatchlings having a big presence in the sequel,” says Cohen.