Founded in 2003, Finnish company Rovio Mobile struggled for years to survive. The company created more than 50 games, none of which brought the desired success. In 2009, Rovio Mobile was on the verge of bankruptcy, but did not lose hope and in a few months the legendary Angry Birds game was born.
Three student friends from Helsinki founded their company in 2003, naming it Relude. At the beginning of their career, the company participated in the Hewlett Packard mobile application development competition, where their game King of the Cabbage World won first place. The game was bought by Sumea (later released under the name Mobile War), and this unexpected victory, as well as the revenue from the sale of the first game, inspired the guys.
At first, the new company specialized in development for the J2ME platform and fulfilled orders from major publishers. A little later, having decided to enter the market with its products, the studio attracted investments from business angels and changed its name to Rovio Mobile.
Generally, the Studio released 51 games between its founding and 2009, but none were acclaimed. These were stories for niche audiences, including several sci-fi and horror stories.
When the iPhone came out in 2007, the team saw a big opportunity and started to develop something completely new. The idea for Angry Birds came to one of Rovio’s designers when he drew some funny images of birds without wings. These birds looked angry, but at the same time cute and memorable. So the team decided to create a game in which players would shoot these birds with a slingshot. The new game was given a budget of €25,000 and the team worked on it for six months as a side project, while producing four games for other companies. Angry Birds was released on the App Store in December 2009.
Rovio tried to get rid of the image of “one game company”, but nothing good came out of it. In 2012, the company released a puzzle game Amazing Alex, but it stayed at the top for only a few weeks. Another, not bird-related project, The Croods, based on the DreamWorks Animation cartoon of the same name, didn’t take off either. Now the company is releasing games in new genres but using already-proven images.
What is Rovio?
Rovio is the name of a mobile game studio, which was founded in 2003 by Helsinki University of Technology students Jarno Väkeväinen, Niklas Hed, and Kim Dickert, and gained worldwide fame with the release of Angry Birds.
In terms of visual identity, Rovio stays loyal to the original design concept, which was adopted right after the official rename of the studio. Throughout the years, the badge was only slightly strengthened and brightened up.
The predecessor of Rovio, Relude Studio, was established in Helsinki in 2003, and the logo for the company was created in the same year. It was a bright blue composition with the capital “R” separated from the lowercase “elude” by two solid triangles, set vertically, with the peaks almost touching.
After the company gained its new name, the logo was redesigned in 2005. The name, “Rovio”, is translated from Finnish as “Bonfire”, and this is what became a basis for the graphical emblem of the studio — the stylized capital “R” drawn in two red strokes, resembling two sharp flames. The “R” was accompanied by a clean uppercase lettering in a narrowed sans-serif typeface, in black and gray.
The redesign of 2011 was also held due to the rename of the studio, but this time it was a minor change. The “Mobile” part of the lettering was removed both from the official name of the studio and its logo. Both the red emblem and the black “Rovio” wordmark remained in their places and kept their original contours.
In 2016 the studio decided to depict their growth and progress with another refinement of the logo. This is when the contours of the R-emblem were cleaned up and drawn in solid lines, a the shade of red became brighter. The black uppercase lettering was rewritten in the same red, balancing the emblem.
The medium-weight uppercase lettering from the primary logo of the Rovio studio is set in a modern and clean sans-serif typeface, which looks pretty close to such commercial fonts as DINreg Next Devanagari, DINreg Next Arabic or Heiders, with minor modifications.
As for the color palette of the Rovio visual identity, since 2016 it has only been composed of a bright and deep shade of red, which perfectly depicts the meaning of the company’s name, and at the same time represents strength and passion.