MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
Angry Birds creator Rovio has launched a new publishing arm designed to bring more experimental titles to the smartphone games market.
It’s called LVL11 and its first title – the Flappy Bird inspired Retry – is available now on iOS in some select countries.
We’ve always been doing a lot of things at the same time, even though we’re of course most known for Angry Birds,” EVP of Rovio’s global games operations Jami Laes told Pocket Gamer.
As a company we’ve been branching off into different forms of entertainment, branching off into education, but within games we’ve been working for a very long time on prototyping a lot of new things and we’ve been finding internally that some of these that we do don’t necessarily fit our Angry Birds brand.
Some of those things are so different that we wanted to package that in a different way and come up with a publishing title for it, a publishing label if you will. So we wanted to take part of our heritage, and part of cultural influences, and take it to – pun-intended, by way of Spinal Tap – LVL11, to really show the world the new and experimental things that we’ve been working on internally.
We just want to make fun, we want to do things differently, and maybe disrupt ourselves, and disrupt the market a bit, so we want to come up with something funny, something to kind of set it out apart from Angry Birds a bit more.”
Retry may not feature the Angry Birds but there are certainly some recognisable elements – chiefly the IAPs. Players are able to play to restart their progress form checkpoints and unlock additional worlds.
