The Slingshot Formula: How Angry Birds joined forces with Star Wars

This is a book excerpt from The Slingshot Formula: How Angry Birds Launched Their Way from Indie Game to Global Icon, written by Pascal Clarysse. The book explores the business tactics, marketing strategies and stunts that helped build Angry Birds’ popularity in the eyes of the public.

Check out our interview with Clarysse and former Rovio veterans about the rise of Angry Birds on our podcast here.

During the development of Angry Birds Space, the team started toying with the idea of having content updates introducing new levels set in the universes of sci-fi classics such as Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Star Wars, and Plan 9 from Outer Space.

Since everybody wanted to partner up with it, Rovio could choose its dream partners, even among those who hadn’t reached out yet. Head of North America Andrew Stalbow picked up the phone and called the company at the top of Rovio’s list: Lucasfilm.

The talk immediately took a very positive turn. The top executives at Lucasfilm had seen what Rovio and Stalbow had pulled off with Fox on Angry Birds Rio and were impressed. Lucasfilm had partnered with many different brands—LEGO Star Wars immediately comes to mind—but, as Philip Hickey notes, “I don’t know if they ever paired with a brand as young on the market as we were.”

It soon became apparent to everyone at Rovio that such a massive opportunity deserved more than a game update.

It was worth a full game. All other possible sci-fi partners were rapidly forgotten and the excitement at Rovio was such that they went all in with Star Wars.

One person didn’t share in the enthusiasm. With Angry Birds Space, Jaakko Iisalo felt he and his team had already delivered the best possible Angry Birds game. Like a few others, he was at the end of his tether. He was getting tired of Angry Birds and wanted to work on something new. It didn’t help that, although he liked the movies, Iisalo was not necessarily the biggest Star Wars geek on the planet. He remembers: “I told my boss that I didn’t want to do it.”

A couple of days later, Petri Järvilehto sat down with Iisalo to calmly talk things through, and eventually convinced him to do just one more version of the Angry Birds game.

They also make a compromise stipulating that Iisalo would pass on the torch before moving on to his next project. Iisalo designed Angry Birds Star Wars in conjunction with his protégés, Sami Lindqvist and Kimmo Sorsamo, with the goal of preparing them to lead the next Angry Birds games.

Iisalo added one further condition: To lessen his workload, he needed somebody very familiar with the Star Wars universe to handle the characters and their attributes.

Fans of the Skywalker Saga since childhood and familiar with its lore, art director Toni Kysenius and character designer Miguel Francisco had the honour of taking on the responsibility.

Free as a bird

One good surprise for Iisalo and his team ended up making the experience much more pleasurable than expected: Lucasfilm granted them total creative freedom.

Kysenius confirms this in Hatching a Universe: “I assumed that there would be limitations. I was concerned we wouldn’t get a say in the design. But it turned out to be amazing, because it was clear that they were as excited to be working with our brand as we were to be working with theirs.”

Salla Hakkola was even given freedom to have fun with the iconic John Williams themes: “We decided to give it our distinct Balkan style. The first internal demo was actually produced using only recorders flutes in the intro; it pretty much sounded like the school kids’ version of Star Wars.”

Obviously, it was imperative that the launch strategy would be cross-media. As with Angry Birds Space, the launch had to be orchestrated across every department. Consumer products were a top priority, and Rovio collaborated for the first time with global leading toy-manufacturer Hasbro, Lucasfilm’s favorite licensee for decades.

In the summer of 2012, Andrew Stalbow hired Naz Cuevas into the Santa Monica branch and put her in charge of consumer products and retail strategy for North America. A top executive in the U.S. for over 20 years, Cuevas had studied business law and worked in sales and marketing for Warner Bros. and Univision, in consumer products for Fremantle Media, and even in video game console accessories for Naki in China.

In short, she is a citizen of the world, an important quality for a global-thinking company: She is of Indian descent, speaks English, Spanish, and Portuguese fluently, and has developed the Latin American market for several of her former employers. She had also worked on numerous brands including Marvel, Harry Potter, FIFA World Cup, Looney Tunes, and The Powerpuff Girls.

Luckily for Rovio, which was beginning to overextend its licensing activities exactly at this time, Cuevas did a fantastic job at protecting the Star Wars license while it was in quarantine. 

Cuevas still remembers her first day and Stalbow telling her, “You manage the most important territory that we have. However, the most important task you have today is to focus. That is the number one challenge that Rovio has, because everybody will want to work with Rovio. You need to be able to say, ‘This is where I need to go.’” Cuevas also clearly recalls his last sentence: “Right now the Lucas relationship is the one to nurture.”

Stalbow and Cuevas decided to team up with Toys “R” Us as a special retail partner for the Angry Birds Star Wars operation. Angry Birds was already present on the shelves of the global toy chain, through Mattel, Commonwealth, and a few other licensees.

Hasbro product lines gave it the opportunity to take things to another level, ensuring massive in-channel advertisement in its 879 American outlets, later expanding into the extra 885 stores it had in 35 other countries. To seal the relationship, Cuevas and Stalbow, in accordance with the marketing team, agreed to hold the press conference for the official announcement in the Toys “R” Us Times Square flagship store. Hickey explains:

It was paramount to keep things confidential with our partners. Leakage greatly damages the ability to make impactful launches. Most leaks actually come through production processes. 

Because those go to retail and you may have at least five people away from the original company and you never know what happens. Every partner had a super NDA (non-disclosure agreement) and they did an amazing job preventing leaks. The extra precautions they took to keep it secret were unprecedented.

Hickey had good reasons to want to protect the unveiling from leaks. He was working on a cool digital plan in which he has a lot of faith. That wasn’t the case for everyone inside Rovio. He recalls, “Many people were asking me, ‘Are you really sure about this?’

Hickey’s line of thought was that they had already made the biggest event possible with Angry Birds Space. But with this one, why not go the other way and make the smallest announcement possible? Star Wars was such a massive brand on its own, Angry Birds was heading toward that status … Match them up and you’d have a huge entertainment headline.

When you have something that big, there’s no need to hype it up and make it bigger. No need to “push” anything to the media. This kind of news was big enough to “pull” the media toward you.

On Friday night, October 5, 2012, Rovio casually dropped a simple three-second animation as a GIF file, the simplest animated file format on earth, very popular with the “meme” community on the internet. The GIF showed Red Bird with Luke Skywalker– blond hair, wielding a lightsaber. The text was a tease about a major announcement planned for the following Monday in the Toys “R” Us Times Square flagship store. It instantly went viral. 

The following Monday. October 8, 2012, the store on Times Square was ready for the press conference, Angry Birds Star Wars imagery plastered across the facade. Hasbro, Commonwealth,

Fifth Sun, and others had all worked around the clock to have prototypes and samples of the consumer product lines ready on time. Paul Southern, VP of licensing and consumer products at Lucasfilm, told U.S. business magazine Fast Company: “Both Rovio and Lucasfilm have worked with 50 licensees in more than 100 countries to develop items from toys to apparel and bedding.”

There was even a giant 2 by 2 meter plush toy of the Chewie Bird—the gigantic red-colored bird, Terence, meets the character Chewbacca from the original movie—sitting on a pedestal in the middle of the room. Besides media, thousands of fans lined up as early as 8 a.m. for the big event, which was massively covered internationally and generated a lot of excitement on-site.

Hickey and the marketing-communications team had kept the gameplay footage under wraps because they wanted to replicate the same “Marketing the Marketing” strategy as with Angry Birds Space, by pacing the material distribution at a sustained tempo. 

If the unveiling of “New Species” characters had generated excitement, Rovio could only speculate about the level of anticipation there would be in fans waiting to see how the Angry Birds Star Wars breed would look.

First came Red Skywalker and Stella Organa, followed by C3PYOLK and R2EGG2, Chuck “Ham” Solo, and Chewie Terebacca, and, of course, the characters from the climactic battle of the original movie, Star Wars Episode IV—A New Hope: Lard Vader and Obi-Wan Kaboomi.

They were all there, stylized either as bird or pig. The final trailer, which was published on November 7, revisited the cult Mos Eisley Cantina scene through three minutes and 30 seconds of animated comedy. The game launched 24 hours later and immediately climbed to number one, after just 150 minutes of being available. It paralleled the Angry Birds Space sales curve, downloaded 10 million times within three days.

The merchandise was already available by October 28 so that the new costumes would be in shops in time for Halloween, and sales figures were huge. Hickey recalls, “Hasbro are the masters at making things collectible. They know how to put the right sets together, they know how to have an unbelievable offering for ‘starting kits’— and the mad collectors know exactly what they want, what completes their sets, and what the exclusives are.”

The Piggy Death Star special edition of classic game Jenga reached the number-one spot in the Toys category of Amazon.com, while the now-traditional National Geographic tie-in achieved the same in books. Over at Barnes & Noble, the numerous Star Wars–related books in existence were brought together with the Angry Birds line into one primelocated mega-aisle.