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That title may sound absurd to many of you, but don’t immediately dismiss it.  Just last week Rovio, the company that created the Angry Birds franchise, announced that Angry Birds has now been downloaded over 350 million times.  That’s a staggering number.  That is a total greater than the current population of the United States and Canada combined.  How about I put it this way.  If you took all the people who downloaded Angry Birds (assuming of course that each download was done by one person, which is probably not the case), and moved them to an empty country, that country would then become the 3rd largest in the world.  No matter how you think about it, 350 million is an extremely large number.  And when some thing becomes that popular, you really do have to wonder if that means something more.  Obviously to reach heights like that, Angry Birds would have to be a very good game.  In fact, I would go as far to say that it might be a great game.


So how great is it?  Well that’s something that is obviously very hard to quantify.  Total downloads (or sales) are certainly a way that we could go about determining the best games ever.  It obviously isn’t perfect, because like with any field, the most popular isn’t necessarily the best.  Bud Light is the top selling beer in the United States, but I think most people would probably agree that it is not the best beer available in the United States.  However, people must like Bud Light for it to be the best selling beer in America.  If Bud Light changed their recipe to include leaving the beer in a dirty vat out in the hot sun for 2 years before it came on to the market, I would assume that would cause a dip in their sales. Quality definitely plays at least some part in overall sales.  We can agree that sales are an imperfect measurement, but it still does carry meaning.

Let’s take a look then at how Angry Birds stacks up against the competition.  At 350 million downloads, Angry Birds would have a higher total distribution than any video game on record.  Tetris comes close with over 100 million downloads on mobile platforms as well as many more on several other platforms.  The next best selling game would be Wii Sports which sold over 76 million copies. That is a misleading total, because the game was bundled with the Nintendo Wii console, so no one actually bought that game.  Following that is the original Super Mario Brothers game for the Nintendo, which reached a total of over 40 million sold.  Again though, that game was bundled with the Nintendo console, so a somewhat misleading number.  If we just decide to skip all the games that were bundled with a system, we end up with Mario Kart Wii having sold more than 28 million copies.  A far cry from 350 million. 

 

Although, to be fair, that 350 million is a misleading total as well.  Not all of the people who downloaded Angry Birds paid for it.  On many platforms, the game is actually available for free.  On the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch combination the game costs 99 cents, but a limited version of the game is available for free on those platforms as well.  Unfortunately, Rovio did not release numbers for how many paid copies of the game were downloaded, so we are only left to guess.  This article suggests that Angry Birds had sold 12 million copies as of October, 2010 on the Apple IOS platforms.  In that article they point out that 25% of the total downloads up to that point were paid.  If we assume that that carries over to today that would be 87.5 million paid downloads.  My guess is that number is too high, but since we have nothing else to go on, we’ll stick with that (to be fair though, because it is available for free in so many places that has obviously hurt their possible sales totals.  One could speculate that if it were not available for free on all those platforms, it may have been downloaded less times, but it still would have a high total of downloads).  That total would be less than Tetris, but it would be way ahead of Wii Mario Kart, so we can assume that Angry Birds is certainly one of the highest selling games of all-time.

Video game sales are a relatively objective measurement of video game quality.  It may be somewhat limited, since as we established quality is not equal to quantity.  But it is one of the most objective measurements I can think of.  The next best objective measurement I can come up with is to use the ratings of critics.  Critics are subjective individually to some degree (they aren’t completely subjective because they are supposed to not be biased and because often times they represent a greater body, i.e. a newspaper, magazine, website, etc., and therefore must match their reviews more to the collective, rather than their own feelings), but if you were to grab a collective of critics, that would give you a result that is more objective.

That was the motivation behind the birth of the site, Metacritc, which does just that.  As their own site describes, they distill “many critics’ voices into the single Metascore, a weighted average of the most respected critics writing reviews online and in print.”  If you’ve never visited this site before, I highly recommend you do.  It is an excellent source for entertainment reviews.  Enough patting those guys on the back.  Back to my piece.

Using Metacritc, the top 5 video games of all-time are the following: 1. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for Nintendo 64 (Metacritic score – 99), Tied at 2nd the XBox 360 and PS3 versions of Grand Theft Auto IV, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 for the Playstation, and SoulCalibur for the Sega Dreamcast (all receiving a 98).  (If you wanted to read more about how exactly they calculate the scores on Metacritic, here is their explanation.)  Angry Birds by comparison ends up with a score of 80.  That is a very good score, but it is way behind the scores of those top 5 games.  So we could say by this measurement that Angry Birds is as I first described, a very good game, and not a great game. (Keep in mind that Metacritic is only evaluating games going back as far as the late 1990s, so if you’re upset that Super Mario Brothers didn’t make their list, well don’t blame me.  Although, if you asked me, I would say it doesn’t belong in the Top 5 of All-Time).

I would be doing a disservice to you though if I didn’t admit that Metacritic is by no means a perfect way to look at this.  Most video game reviewers focus on more serious games, and ignore the ever growing casual games market.  Perhaps it has to do with the massive number of games that appear every day on the casual games market (according to this site, there are 77,566 active games in the iTunes App Store, with about 100 more being added every day).  Perhaps it has to do with critics believing that casual games are not equal to serious games.  Whatever the reason, there are significantly less reviewers of a game like Angry Birds than of a game like Portal 2 (12 versus 53), the game with the highest Metacritic score so far in 2011.  The smaller sample size allows for outlier reviews to dramatically effect the overall score.  That’s not to say that if more critics reviewed Angry Birds that the game would receive a much higher score (it could obviously have the opposite effect), but it does give less importance to the Metacritic score.

I’ve looked at some objective measurements for quality, but how about throwing a blatantly subjective analysis at you, in the form of my humble opinion?  Angry Birds is one of the best games I have ever played.  It may not be one of the deepest, most expansive games I’ve played, but it is nearly flawless in its execution.  The game sets up a simple set of rules, and it follows them perfectly.  When I play Angry Birds I never feel like the game is cheating me.  I may not like, for example, the decision that certain birds are good at destroying concrete bricks, but then aren’t good at destroying wood, but at least it’s consistent.  I don’t find that in one level the yellow bird is great at destroying wood and then find on another level that the yellow bird now struggles to destroy wood.

This sounds like something that should be true of every game; that it follows the rules it establishes.  But I don’t think that is necessarily the case.  I’ve played plenty of games that seem to change the rules of the game throughout and they don’t tell you that they are going to do it.  Sometimes it is because of bad game design, but sometimes it is because it is a bad game.  Whatever the reason, that is not a problem for Angry Birds.  Perfect, it is not, but there is something to be said for hitting your mark, even if it is an easier mark to hit.  It reminds me of a paper I wrote for a film class in college. The professor wrote on my paper that while the point I was arguing was an obvious conclusion, I nonetheless argued it very well.  And I got an A- on that paper.  Not perfect, but certainly very good.

So is Angry Birds the best video game ever?  I would say no.  I especially feel that way when comparing it to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.  I agree completely with the critics when it comes to that game.  The sheer size and scope of the game alone is enough to make it one of the best games I’ve ever played.  Add in the fact that it is one of the few games that I have ever felt any kind of real emotion from playing (I’ve felt mad and happy while playing many games, but this game makes you feel a sad, longing for a life of adventure and triumph that you know can’t really come), and we’re talking about something truly special.

Is Ocarina of Time flawless?  Absolutely not.  Anyone who has tried to navigate the desert sand storm or the escape from the prison near the end of the game (I’ve got a damn sword, why can’t I fight those stupid guards!) I’m sure feels the same way (seriously, those are two of the most aggravating video game sequences I have ever played).  But there is a quality about this game that just stands out.  I’ve played all the Zelda games for the home consoles since this one came out in 1998 (Majora’s Mask, The Wind Waker, and The Twilight Princess) and I’ve never enjoyed them even close to as much as Ocarina of Time.  In fact, I gave up playing all of them, only picking up Wind Waker and finishing it many months later.  All three of these games are quite similar to Ocarina of Time, and yet, they simply didn’t resonate with me like Ocarina of Time did.  I’m not completely sure why that was, but whatever the reason, that is why I feel like Ocarina of Time is the best game I’ve ever played.

Going back to Angry Birds, I would say that this game is probably more important than it is good.  Much like Super Mario Brothers revolutionized the video game industry, Angry Birds, I think has changed the way people think about casual games.  By showing to the industry that a small game can become such a large cultural phenonmenon, Angry Birds has reshaped the industry as a whole.  Designers and publishers now realize that success can come in many forms, as long as the game is well done.