Rovio teams up with Green Day for musical Angry Birds

The Angry Birds' franchise continues to build strong partnerships in various industry verticals

The evil pigs got a bit of a makeover for the latest version of Angry Birds Friends to reflect a famous green trio in the music industry: Green Day.  

Green Day teamed up with gaming company Rovio to launch 10 levels for Angry Birds Friends, a Facebook version of the popular app which let people play against friends on the social network. Each of the new characters was designed to look like the three members of the American Punk Band: Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tre Cool.

Along with these new levels released today, players will get access to hear Green Day’s latest single “Oh Love,” as well as an exclusive song: "Troublemaker.” 

More updates for the Green Day features will roll out later this fall and offer up more content, levels and exclusives. 

“We’re all fans of Angry Birds,” said lead singer Armstrong in a statement. “It’s such an addictive game that when we first started playing it, we couldn’t stop. Go Team Green.”

This partnership comes after Rovio created previous connections with 20th Century Fox, NASA and the Philadelphia Eagles to expand their franchise. 

At this point these levels will only be available in the Facebook game and not yet for the iOS and Android versions of Angry Birds Friends. 

Considering that Green Day has sold 70 million albums and has 25 million fans for its Facebook profile, a great addition to the Angry Birds 20 million fans. 

Rovio's last big milestone was hitting 1 billion total downloads back in May 2012.

Last month Rovio announced the follow-up to its popular Angry Birds franchise, Amazing Alex -- and its first day full day on the charts it soared to the No. 1 paid app in gaming.

After its release, the new puzzle game "Amazing Alex" toped the Apple Store charts with its 99-cent iPhone version (ranking as the best-selling app in 35 countries), and the $2.99 iPad version (which is at the top of the charts in 50 countries).

And not to be ignored outside of the iOS bubble, Amazing Alex is also ranked as the best-selling app in the Google Play store for its first week.

If Amazing Alex takes off at half of the speed and with a fraction of the world-wide recognition that Angry Birds has then Rovio could continue to propel entire franchise markets around the new universe of characters and environments.

Angry Birds has been widely recognized as a hit that successfully crossed over from the mobile app world to real world merchandising. If Rovio continues at this pace, it will maintain as the example of how to create a mobile game with endless monetizing opportunities.