After seeing success, both Leisure Suit Larry and his creator Al Lowe fell upon dark times. Lowe and his polyester-clad protagonist have lived through the rise and fall of Sierra On-Line, multiple intellectual property changes, and two very poor attempts at bringing Larry to a new generation of gamers.

"It was like seeing a video from your son's kidnappers!" Lowe told Joystiq. "On one hand he's still alive but it's like, 'Oh God, what are they doing to him!' And it just pained me to watch it happen. You know I put ten years of my life into that guy and he was very good to me."

Leisure Suit Larry starred in seven titles under the Sierra banner, turning it into a billion dollar business for founders Ken and Roberta Williams. But success would be bittersweet for both Lowe and the Williams family, as Sierra On-Line found itself ensnared in the middle of a hostile takeover that would evolve into one of most infamous scams in video game business history.

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The Angry Birds franchise has hurtled past a billion downloads. The number covers free and paid downloads of Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons, Angry Birds Rio and Angry Birds Space. The news comes a couple days after Rovio revealed revenues of $106.3 million in 2011, with approximately $67.6 million in pre-tax profit.

There's one curiosity in today's video announcing the milestone: the closing moments highlight physics-based Rube Goldberg puzzler Casey's Contraptions. As Gamasutra notes, Rovio has not officially purchased Snappy Touch or Mystery Coconut, the developers of the game. The connection between Rovio and the Casey's Contraptions team is currently unclear.

Causing mass destruction is easily the best part of Prototype 2, and a new batch of DLC should help you do that with a little more panache. The "Colossal Mayhem" pack adds a number of new goodies, including a "Thermobaric Boom-Stick" weapon and a number of new powers and skins for Heller, the game's protagonist. The pack is available now for $5 on PSN and Xbox Live.

The next round of DLC, available May 29, has already been announced as well. The "Excessive Force" pack will include a "Viral Infector" grenade launcher and yet more powers and skins. It will also sell for $5.

In other Prototype 2 news, a companion app has been released for Android and iOS. The app allows users to keep track of achievements and in-game collectible thanks to some handy maps that have all collectibles marked. The app itself is free, though it only includes one map, the Yellow Zone. The remaining two maps can be purchased for $2.

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When the "Two Guys from Andromeda," designers of the Space Quest series, announced their plans to reunite for a new sci-fi adventure game, we noted the surprising lack of a Kickstarter drive. Well, surprise! There's a Kickstarter drive now.

The Guys (Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy) are seeking the increasingly industry-standard $500,000 for their PC, Mac, Linux, iPad, and Android Tablet game. They've already gathered an impressive array of voice actors they'd like to be able to pay, including narrator Gary Owens, Rob Paulsen ("NARF!") and Ellen "GLaDOS" McLain.

Rewards for the drive include phyical "special edition" boxes, your name in the credits, t-shirts, collectible Buckazoid coins, and, in the highest tiers, your likeness in alien form on the box and/or in the game. You can even vote on hilarious death sequences.

[Thanks, Jess]

Before there was, uh, that other game called Alien Hominid (and Castle Crashers), there was the original Alien Hominid, a free browser run-and-gun game that debuted on Newgrounds. And that original game has now surpassed 20 million play sessions, The Behemoth has announced.

The brain child of Tom Fulp and Dan Paladin, Alien Hominid was built in Flash and released on Newgrounds way back in 2002. It would eventually be ported to the GameCube and PS2 in 2004 (and Europe would see Xbox and GameBoy Advance ports), then to Xbox Live Arcade in 2007. Currently, The Behemoth is working on Battleblock Theater.

Despite their occasional protests to the contrary, both Nintendo and Sony have seen the pervasive mobile market take chunks of the portable gaming industry. The mobile app space burgeoned as game developers undercut each other constantly, in a race toward 99 cents that set a buck as the de facto price point for the new marketplace. This, in turn, made a massive price disparity between mobile games and their handheld competition, which tends to retail for much more. Why buy a $30 DS game, when you can buy 30 games for the same price?

However, we're now seeing yet another race all the way to the bottom: free. Even as the PC space is largely adopting a free-to-play, microtransaction-driven business model, the shift is similarly occurring in the mobile market. Recent F2P hits have started a run of similar titles, with some paid apps adopting a free-to-play option.

The change began subtly. Rovio's breakout hit Angry Birds may have stuck near the top of the Top Paid Apps charts, but the Top Grossing arena was ruled by little blue men early last year. Smurfs Village spent months as the Top Grossing app, no doubt bolstered by co-marketing for the then-upcoming film. Still, the free app had an inviting price point, and even a few 99 cent purchases per user would easily push it above the revenue for a one-time dollar fee. Then, Tiny Tower became the talk of the iOS App Store blogosphere, using a similar model inspired by social gaming on Facebook, even garnering recognition as Apple's official Game of the Year.

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Google Play, the download service formerly known as Android Market, crossed 15 billion downloads "a few weeks ago," Google told TechCrunch.

There's no information about what percentage of that 15 billion is games, but we can at least look at this as a handy comparison to the nearest competitor: Google has served up 15 billion since October 2008, while iOS apps have been downloaded (as of March) 25 billion times since July 2008.

There's also no information on how many of those downloads have been since the rebranding – we hope the name change hasn't been too confusing for Android users, leaving them desperately searching for the Android Market.

A new update for Skylanders Cloud Patrol, the arcade shooting gallery tie-in for iOS, is available for download right now. The biggest feature of this new update is Retina Display support for the latest iPad.

The other major feature of this update is allowing more Skylanders. Activision specifically calls out "Warnado, Wham-Shell, Camo and all of the Legendary Skylanders collection" in the update notes, though the full list of now-supported Skylanders is something we're trying to track down right now.

Out of the variety of numbers included in this morning's Rovio 2011 financial report, one line stuck out to us as particularly insane: the employee count. Rovio wasn't a very large company before Angry Birds exploded in late 2009, having only produced a couple dozen under-the-radar mobile titles. But by 2011, the need for expansion was clearly there.

Resultantly, employee numbers similarly exploded – from just 28 employees in early 2011 to a whopping 224 at year's end. In case that isn't a dramatic enough statement unto itself, Valve Software employs 293 people, and Valve has quite a few more things to manage. Our biggest fear – a fear that many Rovio employees likely echo – is that the massive upscaling of jobs will result in a massive downscaling should the Angry Birds franchise lose its foothold as king of mobile distractions. Not exactly a new business model in the game industry, unfortunately.

For now at least, Rovio's employing a ton of Finnish devs to craft its bird flingers and related products. Someone's gotta think of these clever marketing vices, you know!

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The Angry Birds are quite a catch, it seems. Franchise creator Rovio announced this morning that earnings in 2011 topped $100 million, which it owes solely to sales of the Angry Birds franchise. "The heavy investments made in 2011 to all business areas will be seen in future products," Rovio CEO Mikael Hed noted in the press release. "To ensure continuous success we need to be creative and stay focused on entertaining our millions of fans by continuously developing new and innovative products and services." The company earned approximately $67.6 million in pre-tax profit in 2011, or about 64 percent of total revenue.

Hed doesn't necessarily mean branching out from his company's most popular franchise, of course. Especially not after such a big year for merchandising surrounding the Angry Birds – Rovio's "consumer products" unit took in "about 30 percent" of 2011's total earnings (approximately $31.9 million). That's a lot of Angry Birds gummy snacks!

Rovio's $106.3 million in revenue (not profit, mind you, but revenue) is owed primarily to growth in the Finnish company's Angry Birds games catalog, which expanded by just one game in 2011: a movie tie-in named "Angry Birds Rio." The games have been downloaded approximately 648 million times across all platforms as of Dec. 31, 2011, and have a monthly user base of approximately 200 million.

[Image credit: Flickr user 'Nearsoft']

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Draw Something users may be finding a new distraction, according to conclusions drawn by a new report from WebMediaBrands. As reported by the BBC, WebMediaBrands tracks Facebook usage as it relates to mobile applications. According to the data, the number of daily users that log in to Draw Something via Facebook dropped from 14.3 million 10.4 million from April 2 to May 2, suggesting that the game may be losing its death-like grip on the masses.

Zynga acquired Draw Something developer OMGPOP in March for a cool $200 million. It's important to note that the report doesn't include all Draw Something users, as it's also possible to connect with just an email address. Still, assuming the report is accurate, a decline of nearly 4 million daily users probably isn't the best news for the company after making such a large investment.

Team Meat's Edmund McMillen has made some more comments as he goes mobile with a completely new version of Super Meat Boy. According to McMillen, Canabalt is providing some basic inspiration for development.

"Canabalt is closer to what we're thinking about. But Canabalt is very surface-level stuff," McMillen told Polygon. "[The original] Meat Boy was a twitch-based game about memorizing things. [iOS] Meat Boy is the opposite. That's the foundation of its design. But it's also on a touch device, so there's that as well. We want to make a twitch-based platformer that's not about memorization."

As for the art style – the mobile version forgoes the pixels for a more hand-drawn look – McMillen says the more "gentle" approach allows Team Meat to lull players in, only to surprise them with some shocking visuals. "I'm happy about the art style. The more gentle and nice we make it look, the more vicious the story can be. Wouldn't it be so awesome to bait kids in with this happy little Meat Boy thing and then, the ending of the first chapter, instead of the squirrel getting his head knocked off, Meat Boy gets his face sawed in half? Like a skinned looking face looking at the screen?"

Ultimately, McMillen said, "My goal is to scare the shit out of my three-year-old nephew."

With Marvel's The Avengers movie imminent, Zen Studios is dropping the price of its Marvel-themed tables. Until May 7, all of the proficient virtual pinball maker's Marvel tables are half-off for a dollar.

This means some super enjoyable tables – as pinball experiences, not just for the Marvel tie-in – will be discounted on iOS and Android. Captain America, Wolverine and Thor will head up team iOS, while Fantastic Four, Wolverine and Thor tables will be available on Android.

Shadowrun Returns finished its Kickstarter funding round with a total of $1,895,772 in donations to the cause. Announced earlier this month, the project was hoping to raise $400,000 to bring a Shadowrun sequel to PC, iOS and Android as a "graphically rich 2D turn-based single player game."

After hitting some funding milestones, developer Harebrained Schemes and Shadowrun creator Jordan Weisman will include Mac and Linux support, and dole out some physical rewards for contributions. Next, Harebrained Schemes has to make the game and meet some high expectations.

In space, barring any obstructions, there's nothing to stop momentum. Rovio has announced that Angry Birds Space has been downloaded over 50 million times. In Rovio's own words, Angry Birds Space is now "the fastest growing mobile game yet" and breaks the company's records.

Rovio thanked its fans for the game's success, hinting that "something even bigger is on its way." Even bigger than a Mighty Eagle?

Gamestop's plodding metamorphosis from pseudo-pawn shop to actual pawn shop continues, as the massive retailer/reseller is poised to begin accepting four specific Samsung-made, Android-powered devices as trade-ins, according to a report from Gadget Experts.

In addition to the iPhones and iPads already accepted for trade-in, "select stores" will begin accepting the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, Samsung Nexus S and Samsung Infuse sometime this summer, with a nation-wide roll out expected before the 2012 holiday season, Gadget Experts writes. None of this news is particularly surprising, considering that smartphones and tablets continue to gain ground as portable gaming devices. Also, Android devices are a thing that Gamestop isn't selling you that they totally could be, which obviously must be corrected.

Beamdog has announced the writer for all of that new content coming in the Enhanced Edition of Baldur's Gate: Dave Gross. A very experienced fantasy and D&D writer, Gross has worked for TSR in the past, as well as having written two Forgotten Realms novels. More recently, he says, he was "sitting in a coffee shop complaining about the lack of classic RPGs for the iPad, when [Beamdog's] Trent [Oster] appeared in a sulphurous cloud and said, 'Have I got a job for you.'" Gross will presumably work to update the old game, as well as oversee all the writing on the new content as well.

Elsewhere on that team, artist Nat Jones has also joined up. He's got a background in fantasy and horror comics, and has worked on some story elements in Frank Frazetta's Death Dealer comic series as well. Good to hear there's some substantial talent working on this much-anticipated revival.

Remember way back in the olden days of yesterday, when "telekinetic's" Super Metroid-inspired Android battery widget was just something you could look at online? Welcome to the future, where you can download it yourself.

A free version is available, as is a version attached to a .99 donation – should you want to support telekinetic and co-developer T.J. Simmons' continued efforts to make your phone look like different stuff. Simmons told Joystiq they plan to do similar apps in tribute to "other '90s games."

In either case, we'd recommend putting on your Speed Booster and acting quickly, as we suspect this app's home could collapse at any time once the Space Pirates lawyers begin their assault.

Antti Stén and Tuomas Erikoinen have broken free of Angry Birds developer Rovio to start their own studio, Boomlagoon. Stén, Rovio's former lead server architect, and Erikoinen, former lead artist, want to make "convivial and intriguing games," according to Boomlagoon's motto. We bet they were tempted to throw "non-fowl-related" in there, too, but figured it was unnecessary.

Stén is chief executive officer while Erikoinen is chief creative officer; they refer to themselves as "Mr. Plan" and "Mr. Action," respectively. They plan to make games for web and mobile platforms, starting with HTML 5 titles.

"If we play our cards right, we just might end up with the next Angry Birds," Stén told Venture Beat.

EA Montreal is restructuring its workforce. Some individuals are being moved to digital projects, including mobile and social games, while others will be dismissed.

"These are routine changes which address the cyclical nature of the game industry," an EA spokesperson told GI.biz. "A very small number of employees will be impacted – many will be assigned to new projects at EA, others will leave the company."

Just last week, EA told Joystiq that it's growing and plans to hire hundreds this year. EA expects headcount to be up by the end of 2012.