I remember reading somewhere (fairly recently) that they got some major traction only after publishing via Chillingo.

Apparently Chillingo had a good relationship with Apple, and were able to get the game onto the "Featured Apps" list.

Edit: found a link: http://eye-tea-em.blogspot.com/2011/03/talking-about-softwar...

Someone from Norway told me that Angry Birds became popular first in Scandinavian countries because of a famous athlete mentioned it in an interview after he had lost an important match. Apparently the athlete had wasted so much time on Angry Brids that he didn't practice his sport. Popularity then jumped from Scandinavia to the UK and finally to the US.

I'm pretty interested in this as well. I'm working on trying to get in touch with Rovio to do a Skype interview. I'll post it on HN if I can get them. Thanks for the suggestion!

"natural" selection. Replace natural with market, lucky, or whatever floats you're world view.

The fact is a set, X, (lets say 10) of things (games in this case) that are good enough to make it "big". For a combination of reasons the nature of which aren't important (possibly different each time, possibly random) one of them makes it. Then everyone tries to figure out why and copy them.

They are solving wrong problem/chasing wrong tail.

Instead make as many games as you can, serial startup as many companies, ask out as many girls, etc. The larger percentage of the set X are "yours" the larger chance you have of being right place / right time.

If you look (as here) you will find the vast majority of massive success is preceded by many "failures" and/or small success.

Well, once an app manages to get on the top 25, the extra exposure pretty much guarantee it solid sales for a while. Still doesn't explain the bump to get it there though.

The breakout thing was being featured in UK iTunes store. They claim it was due to being popular in smaller markets first, Apple did take a notice of that and put them to "feature list" in UK (http://onsoftware.en.softonic.com/interview-angry-birds-vill...)