Rovio Celebrates Five Years Of Angry Birds By Releasing Fan Made Levels

Want to hear something slightly shocking and downright fowl? Today marks the fifth anniversary of Angry Birds, the mobile game that brought Rovio to fame and stole hours of your life in the process. It's hard to believe it's been five years already, during which time Rovio has shoveled out a dozen Angry Bird iterations. And as gamers, we've collectively flung over 600 billion (with a "B!") birds to date.

We're just getting started with the stats. Those 600 billion birds break down to 85 for every person on the planet. In addition, Angry Birds has amassed 2.5 billion downloads to 1.7 billion smartphone users around the world. Even Dr. Evil would be impressed with all these billions!

Angry Birds

For our fowl efforts, we've been rewarded 150 billion stars across all the Angry Bird titles. To give that some perspective, there are 'only' 100 billion stars in our galaxy. And for the most depressing stat of the day, we've collectively spent 1 million years playing Angry Birds, about the same time that's passed since the discovery of fire.

"When we saw the first concept image for Angry Birds back in December 2009, there was a strong feeling that this was an idea that would take flight - but we couldn’t have dreamt of its scale," said Mikael Hed, CEO of Rovio. "In the past five years Angry Birds has grown into one of the most recognized brands in the world, and Rovio has grown into a global entertainment company producing games, books, animations, theme parks and many other products including a feature film due out in July of 2016."

To celebrate the franchise's fifth "BirdDay," Rovio is releasing "Play the Next Level," which is a collection of 30 new levels created entirely by fans. It's also the result of a social media competition hosted by Rovio and its partners, marking one of the world's largest user generated events with thousands of entries.