Revealed! Angry Birds's world domination plan

"We want to be the first entertainment brand with a billion fans," Rovio’s mighty eagle Peter Vesterbacka squawked last week.

He's talking about the studio's global phenomenon Angry Birds - the addictive and award-winning time-waster about killing pigs by catapulting kamikaze birds at them.

It's already had 250 million downloads across various platforms, but Vesterbacka wants more. Many more.

He wants a quantifiable group of Angry Bird fanatics that mirrors the population of Africa or India. He wants an empire of bird fans and a nation of pig sympathisers.

So how's he going to do it? If Android and iOS users only account for about half a billion combined, where is the Finnish game studio going to find another 500 million suckers to worship at the church of Bird?

Here's how, in nine easy steps.

A blockbuster feature film about the iPhone game isn't just on the cards - its perilously close to production. In June 2011, the Finnish game maker recruited Marvel Studios chairman David Maisel to advise on the forthcoming movie.

"There has been so much chatter about an Angry Birds movie, but it's now real," he told Variety. "The process is starting now."

"People are interacting with these characters six inches from them each time they play, and that creates an emotional connection," Maisel said. "This is not an American thing. It's not even a Finnish thing. It's a global thing - that's something I've never seen before."

Maisel was instrumental in turning Marvel's line-up of comic book superheroes into Hollywood superstars that bring in serious bank every summer. Will he have the same luck he had with Iron Man and Thor with a hodgepodge collection of aggravated avians?

In this new app, aimed mainly at Nokia owners, Rovio wants to make Angry Birds more social. To unlock new stages and download more challenges, you'll have to pause the game, put down your phone, and actually converse with another human being.

Scary, I know.

But if you convince another bipedal ape to knock his mobile against yours, the kinetic energy produced (or, more likely, a Near Field Communication chip) will unlock bonus levels in Angry Birds Magic.

The game has GPS support, too, where you can only grab certain Angry Birds stages by taking your mobile to real-world locations and playing the game there. Essentially, Rovio is turning you into a walking advertisement for its world of bird.

Angry Birds for... Google Chrome, PSP, Mac, and more!

Seeing as Rovio can't court a one-billion-user population on mobile platforms like iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 7 alone, the Finns have started to look further afield.

After hitting almost every smartphone in existence, the Scandinavian firm turned its attention to the console space. Angry Birds hit PSP and PS3 (as a universal PlayStation Mini) in January 2011, and Rovio has announced Xbox 360, Wii, Nintendo DS, and 3DS versions for the near future.

Computers and browsers came next. In January, the game went live on Intel's AppUp center for Intel PCs, before hitting the Mac App Store the very next day. An HTML-5 version was made to show off Google Chrome's performance grunt and a Facebook edition is in development.

If those weren't enough, the company is taking an even broader view of the entertainment spectrum. An update to the Barnes & Noble Nook Color will bring Angry Birds to book nerds later this year, and you'll even be able to play the game on Roku's set-top boxes for a game of Birds between breaks.

Even if Rovio isn't officially supporting a new platform, gamers are so obsessed with the bird-flinging puzzle that they'll make their own port instead.

Bird-obsessed boffin Joel Griffin Dodd hacked together a version of the game that works with Microsoft's body-tracking Xbox 360 camera, Kinect. You simply use your hands to grab a bird, and pull back your arm to prime the catapult.

Or how about the black-and-white eBook reader, the Nook Touch? YouTube user JFreke has squeezed the iPhone version onto the digital tome with varying levels of success.

Sure, the game won't scroll and the will freeze during destruction, but it's Angry Birds! On a monochrome e-ink screen!

Angry Birds... Flip-Flops, Ties, and T-shirts!

Few games have ever been mechanised so ferociously as Rovio's iPhone hit. Enter the developer's digital shop and you'll find an overwhelming catalogue of toys, accessories, and items of clothing depicting the war between birds and swine.

All five birds have four plush toys each (from 5 to 16 inches big), and a small clip-on to boot. There are also four green pigs in four sizes - including one with a moustache and one with a crown - to choose from, and a pig clip-on. That's 42 toys.

That's not all. There are also four different iPhone cases, pig- and bird-style flip-flops, a pair of lunchboxes, a quartet of bags, a $50 tie, two pairs of socks, and a full pencil case and notebook back-to-school kit. Phew.

The snowballing success of Angry Birds has made the four iconic fowls and their 250 million fans perfect advertising fodder. That's why several brands, products, films, and search engines have used Rovio's game to promote their junk.

The big one is animated Fox flick Rio, which partnered up with Angry Birds for a big promotion. The team made a crossover game Angry Birds Rio (on iPhone and Android) and a tie-in commercial at the Super Bowl.

The birds and pigs were also used several times to shill Microsoft's Bing, the Nokia N8 (with a building-sized video advert), and the usual T-Mobile lifestyle guff (with a life-size version of the cult app).

This will let you go hands on with Angry Birds - literally. Boardgame legend Mattel has snapped up the rights to Angry Birds and has already unleashed a physical representation of the iPhone game in toy shops around the world.

It's called "Knock on Wood", and for about £20, you'll get three birds, four pigs, a golden star, a golden egg, a catapult, some cards, and a collection of bits and pieces to build your stage.

"Players draw a card and build the structure shown before their opponents launch an Angry Bird in an attempt to knock it, and the pigs down to win points," the game's instructions reveal.

Sounds like it would be amazing. For about 30 minutes.

No, this isn't an April Fools gag. Rovio plans to self-publish an egg-focused cookbook and distribute it in both eBook and prehistoric paper-based versions.

The Finnish company announced the upcoming tome at the Open Mobile Summit in London this past June, stating that it would further expand the Angry Birds brand.

Speaking of the brand, “It’s not a hobby,” Vesterbacka said. “We have made a lot of money.”

An awful lot.

In January 2011, Rovio announced plans to turn the smash-hit game into an animated series during an interview with C21media. CEO Mikael Hed wouldn't say whether it would air on TV or via the web, though.

The firm has already been pushing into the animation space, with strong acquisitions and big funding rounds.

It purchased Finnish animation studio Kombo and scooped up $42 million in financing from Accel Partners and Atomico Venture. Kombo will kick off with a series of Angry Birds shorts this year.