The Jewel in PopCap's Crown

When Brian Fiete, Jason Kapalka and John Vechey started PopCap Games in 2000, they had a simple plan: Design one courageous a month, which they would then sell to the highest bidder.

It was the previous internet era, and advertising-funded websites were the rage. Fiete, Kapalka and Vechey had been working for Total Entertainment Electronic network, which would get ahead Pogo.com. AOL and Microsoft had sites offering free-to-play games. The games were minor and simple, made-up for telephone dial-up modems, intended to ram down traffic. They were the kickoff of what would come to be known as casual games.

PopCap's low gear courageous was called Diamond Mine. IT was a simple puzzle game in which players moved chocolate-coloured gemstones left, right, up and down to form lines of three or more identical gems. Competitive gems disappeared, and the stones above dropped down to fill the holes, recent ones flowing in constantly.

The business model of developing and selling games like Baseball diamond Mine had great potential. Then came the dot-com crash.

Primary creative police officer Kapalka says that he and his partners weren't truly aware of what was going on. "We weren't very savvy about the business stuff. We like to think that our ignorance was blissful."

Blissful and fortuitous. Preferably than selling Diamond Mine, the young PopCap had to settle for licensing it. Instead of getting a one-time $50,000 payout, PopCap kept the rights to the puzzle form of address that would eventually be renamed Bejeweled and move back on to become one of the transcend 10 bestselling videogames of all fourth dimension.

It's been inducted into the Computer Gaming Global Hall of Celebrity, later on Tetris the lone puzzler game to receive the distinction, and in January 2010, Guinness Macrocosm Records titled Bejeweled "The Most Popular Puzzle Game Series of the Century."

The games have been played by more 500 one thousand thousand people world-wide, and a companion release boasts that 798,000 years of leisure time have been spent playing Bejeweled. That's equivalent to having 70 people performin the game without stopping since the end of the last ice age.

"I think it's done something like $500 million in revenue," says Kapalka. "Close to crazy number."

Not bad for a game created by three guys in the duo of a twin of months.

Beyond merely fair selling well, Bejeweled too birthed the match-three puzzle game genre. Its popularity is wherefore information technology's been copied countless times; Kapalka describes many examples as "largely just depressing," though atomic number 2 has no problem when the impersonation is done well. Kapalka's a fan of Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, the pit-three-RPG hybrid developed by Infinite Interactional and free by D3Publisher in 2007, and admits that he wishes he'd thought process of information technology, vocation information technology "a really unagitated thought."

Cool enough that PopCap co-developed a similar hybrid game with Square Enix. Gyromancer is a downloadable title for PC and Xbox 360 published last fall. "A an experiment, I don't know if it was totally successful," says Kapalka, "but it was exciting. What it also proved was that Mystify Bespeak was a good deal harder to Doctor of Osteopathy than it looked."

Such an interest in experimentation is one reasonableness for PopCap's success.

Kapalka says the design team conducts many experiments when working on new versions of Bejeweled, and not all features get enforced. "Generally we establish that several of them will add complexness to the game, but not fun," he explains. Boulders that pot't be one-to-one, for instance, are interesting from a strategic viewpoint, but Kapalka said assume't make the unfit more enjoyable to play.

Technological advances warrant changes, however, and sequels, especially for popular franchises, are all important for companies to hold back revenues flowing.

But Bejeweled's popularity is problematic because people get into't want it to change. Kapalka admits that upgrading it has been tall. "It's a gimpy that people obviously like in its basic form," atomic number 2 says. "You want to try and suppress updating it … but at the same time you put on't wishing to wreck it by adding silly things."

PopCap has tried to avoid what he believes happened with that other common puzzle game. "Tetris would always have these updates," Kapalka explains, "and they'd have some new matter, and the new affair would benevolent of suck," driving players back to classic mode.

The appearance of Bejeweled Twist in 2008 provided the first evidence that some fans of the franchise wanted the game to stay faithful its roots. In Twist, matches are made by rotating groups of gems, not swapping them.

Kapalka says it "upside-down off a lot of people." The problem was that the rotational mechanic was a "fairly radical change." While some players liked the new dynamic, those who expected to be moving gems left, right, up and down were upset. Some felt that they had been tricked and betrayed.

In the future, says Kapalka, if He finds a game mechanic he likes and wants to follow through, he South Korean won't embody in such a rushing to make it into a Bejeweled claim. While helium admits that leveraging the conversancy of the enfranchisement is ever tempting, sticking the Bejeweled name along just anything only dilutes the brand, and annoys the customers.

"Thither's been a few casual games that have done that," he explains, citing Diner Dash as an exemplar. "IT's got then many variants and sequels. The original game is still acceptable, but on that point's been so many middling variations that information technology's possibly lost a trifle bit of its iconic power."

PopCap lately undraped Bejeweled 3, the outset update to the franchise in ii long time, and only the fourth sequel. It features in writing and animation updates to impart the game into the high-definition world, and innovations from previous iterations that had already gained fan acceptance.

Bonuses for making matches quickly and the ability to make swaps simultaneously while gems are cascading are features that appeared in Bespangled Blitz, the Facebook version of the game released in 2008. Lightning mode, in which the objective is to rack skyward points atomic number 3 time runs out, was inspired by Blitzkrieg, which in turn brought IT from Twist.

Also derived from Twist is Spangly 3's Zen mode. It is included because PopCap learned that many people played Bejeweled in order to relax, a revelation that surprised Kapalka.

"A portion of people performin information technology weren't playing it like a regular game, and the share they didn't suchlike was losing," he explains. "They didn't care if it was a game operating room not." Kapalka decided to accept and embrace that fact.

The variant of Zen in Beaded 3 allows players to shuffling adjustments to a number of features designed to assist liberalization. The game medicine can glucinium replaced with ambient sounds, positive affirmations tush be displayed along the screen and headphone users can throw different frequencies played in for each one ear. There's also breathing feedback, audio and visual cues to modulate and regulate a player's breathing.

It won't comprise for everyone, Kapalka admits, but those who do like IT will find it interesting. And, hopefully, relaxing.

Bejeweled 3 likewise includes a few new mini-games, including one that harkens back to Bejewled's roots.. "When we were testing," says Kapalka, "we found that a lot of the testers ended rising spending half their time playing the Infield Mine mode once they'd unfastened IT."

PopCap is often different than IT was 10 days ago. Today headquartered in a Seattle function, not an apartment, the company has development studios in Chicago, Dublin, San Francisco, Seoul, Shangai and Vancouver. It's had success with other casual games including Peggle, digital pachinko, and Plants vs. Zombies, tower defense for the masses.

What hasn't changed is the pattern for success: distilling a game down to a particular mechanic. Plants vs. Zombies, for example, was PopCap's "attempt to lease a hard-core genre and make it to a greater extent approachable," says Kapalka. "I believe that if I can enjoy a game, then in theory a lot of other mass should besides be able to enjoy that game."

The designers at PopCap, he adds, try to identify and remove whatever barriers that might keep people from playing, the like the five-hour tutorials that are part of some of the complicated strategy games Kapalka likes to play in his spare time.

"If you can make it easier and more pleasant to get into the game, then it opens adequate to a lot more people," he says, suggesting that it's viable that PopCap leave someday release a casual version of one of those games at some period. "We harbor't necessarily succeeded yet."

"A sight of our experiments lede to inoperative projects," Kapalka admits. "Only we have a big depository library of experiments that didn't Adam anywhere and every on occasion we go back to them. Few of them are just going to be dead." Only one of them, perhaps, is some other diamond just waiting to be discovered.

Blaine Kyllo writes on video games, engineering and pop culture. Atomic number 2 lives in Vancouver.

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/the-jewel-in-popcaps-crown/

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