Rovio To Launch Angry Birds Free with Magic, Requires NFC To Unlock Levels

Finnish app developers Rovio is to introduce a new title to its Angry Birds franchise, launching Angry Birds Magic, a new game that will launch on Nokia smartphones which run the latest Symbian Anna update, requiring users to interact with NFC tags to unlock levels.

The company will unveil the game at this week’s WIMA NFC Conference, initially for attendees, launching the game with twenty levels of pig destruction madness. Angry Birds Magic will encourage users to seek out strangers with NFC-enabled phones, because only five of the are playable as normal.

When the fifth level is completed, the user will need find a friend or random person with their NFC-enabled phone, unlocking levels only when they touch phones with another handset owner. One friend will unlock five more levels, a second an additional five, and the third will unlock the five remaining levels.

If you don’t have a friend with a NFC-enabled phone, Rovio and Nokia are asking users to find NFC tags, which could be embedded in any item or object. They are quiet on where these will be located but we are sure there will be a commercial tie-in somewhere.

“With Angry Birds Magic, friends can group together to combat the pig menace, in a new take on the game that so many people all over the world have fallen love with,” said Mikael Hed from Rovio. “This is an exclusive offering with the Nokia C7, a smartphone that really kicks off the NFC experience for developers. In time, the communal power of users with Angry Birds Magic could prove even stronger than the Mighty Eagle.”

Angry Birds Free with Magic will be preloaded on the new Nokia C7 as part of the Symbian Anna update, rolling out across all of Nokia’s NFC-enabled devices in 2011. Rovio aims to ready a full version of the game, made available via the Ovi Store, which will add more levels and add new features which utilise the new NFC feature.

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