Angry Birds Space will be out on Thursday, but for those that are hopelessly addicted to murdering jade porcine aggressors by hurling red avian balls at them, a brand new edition of the game may not be enough to satisfy. What thrills remain when you’ve killed as many pigs on your iPhone as you can? Where can you go for the harder stuff? Theme parks, according to creator Rovio.
According to a Wednesday report in Reuters, Rovio’s grand expansion of its Angry Birds brand will include branching out into “themed activity parks” it’s developing with Finnish playground equipment company Lappset. The parks will pop up first in Finland then expand into Britain. Rovio isn’t opening up a multi-billion dollar theme parks in the vein of Disneyworld or Six Flags, but rather smaller playgrounds with climbing towers, swings, sandpits, slides, and outdoor arcade games. The article suggested that the parks could appear inside of larger theme parks though.
Video games have always enjoyed a loose symbiotic relationship with playgrounds and amusement centers. When Atari founder Nolan Bushnell started up the still-running Chuck E. Cheese franchise of entertainment centers back in the 1970s, he saw it as the natural evolution of how people played games. Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi actually branched out of game design and into playground design, creating a play area in the Woodthorpe Grange Park in the British city Nottingham.
The only question now is whether it’s humane to paint pigs and then throw actual birds at them. Probably not.
