Angry Tennis Birds
Creative hack to spice up broadcast tennis to the squawks of Angry Birds
Overview
Let’s face it: grunting tennis players are incredibly annoying, and it seems to be getting more and more common in the women’s game. So in the spirit of “if you can’t beat them, join them” I created this mash-up to vent some of my vexation, write some fun code, have a giggle, and share with the world.
The app allows the user to “Angry Birds-ize” any external website, such as BBC Tennis, and “play along” to live tennis games using their keyboard, which trigger the comedic sounds from the Angry Birds games.
Playing Angry Tennis Birds (opens new window) makes any tennis match a fully interactive experience, with separate effects for shots (back-swing and fore-swing), victories, and crowd noises!
Implementation
The HTML5 Google Chrome release of Angry Birds effectively open-sourced the game assets, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch to use them in a mash-up.
The app is run on external sites using a JavaScript injection via a JavaScript bookmarklet, dragged from an original source on the Angry Tennis Birds website.
The application itself is JavaScript, with a tiny visual front-end, and – as of 2022 – HTML 5 audio.
Press
Interestingly, after releasing Angry Tennis Birds at the start of the 2011 Wimbledon championship and publicising it as much as I possibly could on twitter, facebook, and via friends, a week or so later an article appeared in the Sun newspaper titled “Angry Birds - Grunting girls noisier than creatures on app” :
I emailed the paper subsequent times… but as soon as the topic came up, communication stopped. Read into that what you will!
Updates
2020
Interestingly, an Angry Birds Tennis (opens new window) game launched on iOS in February 2020, but the title was cancelled (opens new window) in October of the same year. Hardly surprising with the amount of exposure and how long it’s been in the public consciousness, but it looks like the Angry Birds franchise has probably had its day (opens new window).
2022
The “birds” angle probably hasn’t aged too well, but Angry Tennis Birds was always fun to play, so I’ve updated the code to run in modern browsers.
Links
Play tennis:
Media: