Mikael Hed, CEO of Finnish game studio Rovio, discusses how their immensely Angry Birds, began with just a simple screenshot of an unhappy bird character. When a little iPhone game called released late last year, nobody predicted what a massive success it would become. Nearly eight months later, 's 2D physics puzzler's surpassed the 5 million sales mark, while CEO of Rovio, Mikael Hed, discusses the origins of his company and the inspiration for their flagship title, Angry Birds. GamePro: Can you take us back to how Rovio began and discuss your own involvement within the company?

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Mikael Hed: My cousin Nicholas -- who is now the COO -- started it. He and fellow students participated in a competition arranged by Hewlett-Packard and Nokia to make a real-time multiplayer game for mobile phones. They won the competition, and at the end of 2003, officially started making games together. I actually joined the company twice, the first time in early 2004 back when it was only the three founders.

I came in to take care of the business side of things. In 2005 we were the recipient of a small investment, and after that we expanded quite fast to about 25 people. I left the company shortly after that, but in early 2009 I was asked to join again. When I started in 2009 all the company was doing was work-for-hire stuff, but none of those games were really big enough to sustain the company. We worked with some of the biggest companies in the mobile space for a few years including Electronic Arts and Digital Chocolate.

GP: How did you and the team come up with the concept of Angry Birds, a game where players use a slingshot to launch unhappy birds into structures and enemy pigs? MH: We were doing work for hire, so our strategy was that it will take a number of titles before we could realistically make one hit. We started taking less contracts to free up our own guys for internally-created projects. Then for the actual game we had a number of proposals coming from the team, and one of them was just this screenshot.

Many of the proposals that we got were really well thought out, and then we had this one screenshot of this angry bird character just trudging around on the ground. Everybody in the room really liked the bird characters. In the first meeting we said 'okay, we should look at this character and come up with gameplay for it.' Prior to this meeting we had set up strict criteria to determine which game we would go with, but we threw that out for the angry bird character. GP: Aside from the iconic angry bird characters, what inspired the gameplay itself?

MH: The inspiration probably came from other games -- Angry Birds definitely has a mixture of games in it. Msc license manager. The most important part inspiration-wise for us were the characters. We started development in March 2009. There were a lot of people in the project throughout development. Probably about 10 people all-in-all. Towards the end we had four or five people.