Angry Birds use Seattle’s Space Needle to blast into orbit

Angry Birds Space debuted this week amid some unusual marketing efforts.

In Seattle, Rovio Entertainment and T-Mobile USA took over the Space Needle by creating a 300-foot-long slingshot with a 35-foot-tall Red Bird affixed to the 605-foot-tall tower. Was it worth the effort? Well, this is probably what it takes to stand out in marketing these days if you want to be heard all over the planet.

Angry Birds Space is the latest entry in the Angry Birds series, which has been downloaded more than 700 million times and is among the most popular mobile game franchises in history.

The good news is that the gameplay of Angry Birds Space is a surprisingly fresh spin on the standard bird-flinging action.

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.