Angry Birds - the time sink

I mentioned in a previous blog about Steve Jobs asking the Mac developers to shave a few seconds off the boot-up time (he referred to it as "saving lives" apparently). The story was featured in The Triumph of the Nerds.

I found myself wondering recently if the opposite conversation took place among the developers of Angry Birds? Did they ask themselves how many lives they could waste?!

I can hear the conversation now: "What if we can get 12 million people to download it? And what if they each spend 2 hours playing it? That's 2,739 years! Or 34.5 lifetimes!"

And what is there were more like 1 billion downloads! And what if the time was much, much more than 2 hours!