Today on IndustryGamers there was an article about the 8 reasons it was a success. While all the reasons were valid, the biggest missing reason had to do with the game itself: how they made it addictive. Yes, it is fun to destroy wood/glass/etc. structures with flying birds, but the key to making it playable, i.e. accessible, was that it reloaded so easily.
If you didn't like how your level was going, you could reload it at any time by hitting the reload button in the upper right at any time. There was no long pause or animation or other sequence to get in the way of retrying it. Given the trial and error nature of the game, this was essential. Other games could learn from this. The biggest offender was a "core" game called Too Human:
Every time you died a Valkyrie would come down from the sky and take your body up to Valhalla. The sequence was just long enough to make deaths very frustrating as it took a while to get back into the action. And in an action type game such as Too Human, that was really, really annoying.
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