PeterVesterbacka
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No Comment: Rovio exec's wife dresses up Angry Birds style
In these pics over at the Hollywood Reporter, you can clearly see Peter Vesterbacka, the CEO of Rovio, who you may remember from his speech earlier this year at GDC 2011. The woman he's pictured with is none other than his wife, Teija Vesterbacka, who, according to the pictures, looks like a very lovely and elegant woman. The two look like they're about to have a very good time at a very fancy dinner, which is called the Castle Ball at the Finnish Presidential Palace, a formal event to celebrate Finland's Independence Day. The dress that she's wearing, however, clearly modeled after the big red Angry Bird? Well -- no comment.
Nokia Asha brings Angry Birds to the developing world, Mighty Eagle soars (video)
Well we're pretty Angry ourselves, being that Nokia nearly foiled our liveblog plans and made it all but impossible to transmit photos and video thanks to an absolutely miserable attempt at providing internet access. But Nokia World is not without mobile gaming opportunities, and a few minutes with the Birds seemed to do the trick (shifting our moods, at the very least -- there's still no reliable internet). We met up with Mr. Angry Birds himself, Peter Vesterbacka, who took us through a demo of the game on one of Nokia's new Asha Series 40 devices. The game, which has already seen an absolutely massive 400 million downloads, will come preloaded on the Asha 303, giving Vesterbacka and Rovio a chance to bring the game to emerging markets in China, India and Africa, where touchscreen devices are currently priced out of reach. The game seemed to perform just as well as it does on other platforms, so expect the same Angry Birds experience here as well. Jump past the break for a hands-on with Rovio's Mighty Eagle.
GDC 2011: Building the Angry Birds franchise
Rovio's Peter Vesterbacka hosted an entertaining panel on the first day of the 2011 Game Developers Conference here in San Francisco. Rovio's app, Angry Birds, is the runaway hit of Apple's iOS platform, signifying both the potential reach of iOS games and the chance for indie mobile developers to create gigantic hits. Vesterbacka, speaking in his Finnish accent, was almost arrogant at times during his talk, saying that after last year's GDC, Rovio is "a bit more popular now for some reason," and that while people laughed at his predictions of 100 million downloads for the game across all the platforms, Rovio is basically there. But he was also informative and helpful, and he thanked Apple multiple times during the talk. Rovio's made 52 different mobile games so far, and Vesterbacka credited Apple for changing the tempo around the mobile games market. Before Apple, mobile carriers held all of the power, and carriers both a) wanted a lot of games for their specific platforms, and b) didn't care about the quality. Vesterbacka joked about pitching Angry Birds to a carrier before the App Store: "It's a game where you slingshot birds at three pigs," he said, and then he mimicked the reply to the crowd's laughter: "It's not a poker game? Not interested."
Angry Birds spreading to consoles, sequels, feature films
The whole premise seems pretty simple, right? Evil piggies steal eggs, birds get angry, angry birds attack pigs, gamers struggle with addiction. But not so fast: have you ever wondered what the pigs think of all of this? Speaking at the Virtual Goods Summit in London, Rovio CEO Peter Vesterbacka let it drop that there was, indeed, a sequel to Angry Birds in development, going on to say that it would "surprise people. No one has told the story from the pigs point of view." But that ain't all! The company is apparently planning to milk this franchise for all it's worth, a multiplayer game "like old school Worms games" and a Facebook game taking priority, as well as porting the game to PSN, Wii, and Xbox, and some sort of film or TV show. We have to wonder who's going to play the red bird. Please let it be Alan Thicke. This is the best news since we heard there was a possible Asteroids movie in the works!
