Angry Birds bound for Xbox, PlayStation

Angry Birds, a popular smartphone application, will soon be available as a console title.

The popular mobile app Angry Birds will soon be available on the Nintendo Wii, the Microsoft Xbox 360, and the Sony PlayStation 3. That's the news from the Finnish game studio Rovio, who announced the existence of a console edition of Angry Birds at the first annual Social Gaming Summit in London. No release date or price was specified; Rovio said only that it was hoping to include some sort of multiplayer functionality.

Angry Birds has been one of the great runaway hits of 2010. The game topped the iTunes charts for most of the year – the price tag on the Apple marketplace was only a buck, making Angry Birds very attractive to casual gamers – and a free version for Android phones has also proved popular. According to GameSpy, total downloads of the game have surpassed the 30 million mark.

“People like to be entertained,” Carl Howe, a director at tech research firm Yankee Group, told the Monitor earlier this year. “We think of ourselves as being overworked and busy all the time, but the reality is that we have lots of little nooks and crannies in our day. Apps are a good way to wile away the 5 minutes we’re waiting for the bus.”

Unfortunately for Windows users, Angry Birds has not yet been made available for Windows Phone 7 handsets. Way back in October, one blogger located an advertisement for the new Windows 7 mobile operating system, which appeared to indicate that Angry Birds would be among the applications available at the WP7 launch. But Rovio caught word of the ad, and quickly issued a denial via Twitter.

"We have NOT committed to doing a Windows Phone 7 version," Rovio reps wrote. "Microsoft put the Angry Birds icon on their site without our permission." In a subsequent post, a rep added that the company "could do a WP7 version of Angry Birds," but said that was "not the issue. We have not agreed to do that (yet). Will support all relevant platforms."