User blog:Entertainmentz/When Angry Birds and Pinball Collide: Imagining Pinball Adaptations For The Franchise

Please be advised that this article contains spoilers for the recently released The Angry Birds Movie 2''.

It's not hard to imagine Angry Birds and pinball going together so well. The mobile game Angry Birds Action!, which also inspired the battle system of Angry Birds Evolution, was the first game in the franchise to adopt pinball-like physics, as players bounce Birds around in a 2-D plane to knock down Pigs and save Eggs. And the world has also seen the appearance of at least one custom-built Angry Birds pinball table.

But after the release of two widely-marketed animated film adaptations, sadly, no one has ever thought of designing proper, high-production pinball versions of them...until one "pinhead" decides to imagine what it would look like if that were to happen.

Fascinated in and particularly inspired by the unique designs of licensed, virtual pinball adaptations of various pop culture franchises, crafted by none other by Zen Studios, the gold standard in virtual pinball, this dedicated fan, a great admirer of Angry Birds after seeing both movies, set out to put to pen and paper how they would receive treatment if Rovio and such an esteemed virtual pinball developer were to, say, strike up a partnership to make pinball adaptations based on the Angry Birds franchise.

Both tables were crafted with the typical cookie-cutter pinball formula of having the player complete several main missions to unlock a climatic wizard mode to achieve victory. As for what those missions would be, it would be logical to link them to key scenes in the movies, mostly that involve action or advance the plot in some way, and by logical extension, make the final conflict in the third act of each film the wizard mode. The unique designs of the lanes, or all the possible ways a ball could be shot through the table, as well as some of the potential gameplay effects they could impart, were each tied to the unique quirks of each major character in the movies. For instance, in the table for the first movie, since Chuck is known to be some speedy bird, it was decided that he would be represented by a huge orbit that framed much of the upper half of the table, especially when he's known to just run in circles in his house to exercise. If the player shot his orbit several times enough, they'd get a taste of his speedy nature, and that could translate to a hurry-up side mode where the player must rush to earn some big points before that opportunity, say shrinks to nothing. In the table for the second movie, it would make sense for his sister Silver to be represented as this looping crossramp - after all, in the Angry Birds 2 game, she loves to loop around to hit some tough-to-reach targets. The fact that the crossramp crosses over from the left side of that table, represented by the Birds, to the right side, represented by the Pigs, best reflects how friendly she is to them, as well as how she did her best to hold the Bird-Pig team together in critical moments during the mission to stop Zeta. Due to her unparalleled leadership, it would then make sense to have the crossramp trigger a random award that would absolutely be of great help for the player in one way or another.

Efforts were made to make sure that the tables, as designed on pen and paper, would look fun to play, and that either table would not look identical to each other, or look too terribly similar to any of Zen's tables, although certain design elements were taken straight out of them. (For example, the Anger multiball lock system was inspired by the Ghost multiball lock system on Zen's Star Wars Rebels pinball table.) And it is also important to make sure that the architecture of the tables don't allow for the ball to get stuck, or create a frustrating experience in some way were the tables to become reality.

There is now no doubt that both Angry Birds movies could become pinball tables, but a case could be made that a third pinball table about Angry Birds could be designed, knowing that Zen likes to release pinball collections in threes sometimes (for example, Bethesda Pinball, Aliens vs. Pinball and Universal Classics Pinball) - and that third table would delve into the world of the Angry Birds Stella spin-off that debuted in 2014 to address concerns over the lack of female characters in the series, before seemingly fading into obscurity. One detail that would be insisted to be brought into this special table is that the spin-off's characters be depicted the way they looked in the movies - with wings and talons - because of how little of a role they got in them. There is a great desire to see if such a pinball table were to once again let Angry Birds fans know that Stella and her friends are not meant to be ignored and left on the sidelines...