The Angry Birds Marketing Case Study: What They Did Right

It is rare that a mobile game reaches such status as to be included on a list of overall video games. But Angry Birds managed to break the mold and launch into the mainstream. People all over the world adore this game, and it went from being a clever app to a global phenomenon. The other day I was at my child's school and I saw a kid wearing an Angry Birds t-shirt. That alone shows how the game has managed to capture a spot in a market that it seems it would have been impossible to break into.

When looking at the game, it is tempting to say it was luck. After all, some terrible things become successful and some wonderful ones don't. It may be possible that Angry Birds was just a beneficiary of the elements aligning, and nothing more is behind it. But this kind of thinking is wrong, and completely misses the genius of both the game and the marketing campaign, a case study that shows exactly how content should be marketed in today's age of technological furvor.

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Life Is A Game: Level Up Life and HabitRPG

Have you ever wished that your life was more like a video game? Visualized a “level up” sign above your head on your birthday? Imagined getting experience points for every project you turned in?

What if I told you that all of the above was not only possible, but also free?

Of course, you won't literally become a video game character. There won't be an extra life or a save/reload option, but you will have fun and you just might pick up a new hobby or kick a few bad habits. What am I talking about? The two apps – HabitRPG and Level Up Life – which combine gamification with productivity methods to challenge and motivate you in a refreshing and original way.

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Twitch Plays Pokemon

Over the past week there has been a wide event taking place over at Twitch.tv called “Twitch Plays Pokémon”, or “TPP” for short. It is an online play-through of one of the classic Gameboy games “Pokémon Red”. But it’s not just one group of friends playing the game and commenting on it. Twitch Plays Pokémon is literally 70+ thousand viewers including you if you watch it, playing through this game using only commands that you typed out on your keyboard. TPP takes the concept of a thousand monkeys in a room full of typewriters, and replaces the typewriters with one Pokémon game. The results may actually surprise you.

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Flappy Bird Review

Over the past week I’ve been hearing a lot of good and bad things about this hit sensation called “Flappy Bird”. But what is flappy bird? Believe it or not it is an Android and iOS game made by Dong Nguyen and as soon as it became a big hit, it was taken off of the map due to the creator saying he didn’t want this fame and didn’t mean for this game to be that successful. So on February 8^th Flappy Bird was taken off of the app store so no one could play the game anymore. I wondered why this game was a personal favorite by many, so I decided to look around until I found an exact copy of the game made in Flash.  So it may not be the original, but it can give me a good insight on what the hype was all about for this game.

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Game Time Episode 1: Contra

Game Time was an idea I had back in summer 2013 that was going to combine the use of video game reviews and a dry (almost non-existent) sense of humor. With the holidays coming and going I was finally able to work on the idea a bit further, allowing me to finish the first episode. In this episode of game time we are going to be looking into the game called “Contra” and it’s personal creepy factor. From the creature design to the general idea of the game itself, we find out that many different levels of creepy exist in this classic NES game. 

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