Angry Birds Space rockets to 10M downloads in 3 days

Rovio reaches for the stars with the first of five Angry Birds' games to be released this year

The highly anticipated and out-of-this-world Angry Birds Space debuted on Thursday to great acclaim and Monday morning, the creators at Rovio tweeted that in the first three days the game was downloaded 10 million times.

Rovio did not disclose how this compared to previous Angry Bird games but the movie-tied Andry Birds Rio did reach 10 million downloads in 10 days back in April, so this is clearly a ramping up of Angry Bird excitement.

Angry Birds Space was released for iOS and Android devices, as well as the Mac and PC. The company didn’t immediately release a Windows Phone version, but, according to Rovio CEO Mikael Hed, the Windows version is on the way.

The atmospheric version of the popular Rovio games comes with some different functions and currently has 60 levels of pig attacking abilities.

Also, this game offers more content with in-app purchases and has hidden extras and secret levels, much like the console games many grew up with -- possibly helping meld the old world of console gaming with the new world of mobile.

Buzz had been building around this game has been growing for several weeks since people heard Rovio was working with NASA to use real factors of zero gravity and microgravity in its calculations and has hope of sparking math and physics interest in kids that are living in a post NASA-government world. 

The new game also provides a whole new set of birds and pigs to create in their successful merchandising arm. I now see kids everywhere in Angry Birds backpacks, shirts and clutching to plush dolls of their favorite characters -- now those characters will have a sic-fi feel and might even have oxygen helmets on.

Rovio also plans on releasing four more Angry Birds games in 2012 -- thats a lot of potential for more mercy, more downloads and more content upgrades at $.99 a pop.