"A nearly bankrupt Finnish company called Rovio hit upon a similarly perfect fusion of game and device: Angry Birds."

The New York Times Magazine is deservedly getting a lot of play for the Asteroids-like video game it’s embedded in the online version of its feature “Just One More Game…” but Sam Anderson’s article is excellent, gimmicks or not. It looks from every angle at our obsession with seemingly dumbed-down, repetitive, low-fi digital time-killers in the age of the iPhone. From Anderson’s article, an excerpt about the back-story of two relentless compulsions, Tetris and Angry Birds:

“Tetris was invented exactly when and where you would expect — in a Soviet computer lab in 1984 — and its game play reflects this origin. The enemy in Tetris is not some identifiable villain (Donkey Kong, Mike Tyson, Carmen Sandiego) but a faceless, ceaseless, reasonless force that threatens constantly to overwhelm you, a churning production of blocks against which your only defense is a repetitive, meaningless sorting. It is bureaucracy in pure form, busywork with no aim or end, impossible to avoid or escape. And the game’s final insult is that it annihilates free will. Despite its obvious futility, somehow we can’t make ourselves stop rotating blocks. Tetris, like all the stupid games it spawned, forces us to choose to punish ourselves.

In 2009, 25 years after the invention of Tetris, a nearly bankrupt Finnish company called Rovio hit upon a similarly perfect fusion of game and device: Angry Birds. The game involves launching peevish birds at green pigs hiding inside flimsy structures. Its basic mechanism — using your index finger to pull back a slingshot, over and over and over and over and over and over and over — was the perfect use of the new technology of the touch screen: simple enough to lure a suddenly immense new market of casual gamers, satisfying enough to hook them.

Within months, Angry Birds became the most popular game on the iPhone, then spread across every other available platform. Today it has been downloaded, in its various forms, more than 700 million times.”

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Tetris, the music: