![]() ![]() “I think Bejeweled might have been the first new, actual good game in that space,” says Brian Fiete. “….we had the insecurity of people saying, ‘I played it for five hours, but it’s not really a game.’ You fucking played it for five hours! What the hell!” - PopCap co-founder John Vechey I swear, it was like four days later I showed my uncle and he said, ‘Hey, this is fun to play.’ Then we had three months of trying to make it into more of a game, polishing it, and then we had the insecurity of people saying, ‘I played it for five hours, but it’s not really a game.’ You fucking played it for five hours! What the hell!” “Brian had programmed a different version of it in 24 hours, and then 24 hours later Jason had done some art added on top. Brian went off and programmed a better version of the game in Javascript.” We thought: this is an interesting mechanic, we can probably make a better game with this idea. It was just a bunch of colored squares that you could swap, and if you made a row of three they disappeared and it fell down. It was called Colors Game, this really primitive game, it didn’t have sound effects, animation, didn’t even really have graphics. What we were aware of was someone had found a really crappy Javascript game. But to be honest we weren’t aware of that. ![]() “The original was, I think, a game called Shariki,” remembers Kapalka. And while it wasn’t the first match-3 game, it was certainly the first most people played. ![]() Originally conceived under the name “Diamond Mine”, it was a simple game in which you ‘mined’ gems by swapping tiles to make lines of three or more. It was split up like this that they first started putting together what would eventually become Bejeweled. In 2000, Jason Kapalka was based in the Haight, San Francisco, while John Vechey and Brian Fiete were in Renton, Washington, each working out of their own apartments. So, giving it a go, the first thing they tried their hands at was a little match-3 game called Bejeweled. They believed they could do it far more efficiently than these big studios, and hopefully make enough money to keep themselves ticking over. #BEJEWELED 2 ONLINE SLOT LICENSE#The trio’s aim was to create simple, downloadable games, that they would be able to license back to companies like Microsoft and Pogo (formerly TEN). “In retrospect, probably not the best title,” acknowledges Kapalka, but “the URL was certainly available.” (I strongly recommend against checking it today.) At one point he and Vechey had used it to release a since-abandoned strip poker game, Foxy Poker, and the company was lying dormant. Kapalka had already created a company called Sexy Action Cool, a name inspired by a promotional poster for Robert Rodriguez’s movie, Desperado. Vechey and Fiete eventually got jobs at Sierra Online, but, as Kapalka puts it, all three felt “a little disgruntled with our work environment.” They decided to start their own company. I was given the job of trying to entertain them.” Or as Kapalka recalls, “They were definitely two 19-year-old kids out of an Indiana trailer park. There they met Jason Kapalka, a former games journalist and one of the original members of TEN, who was put to work on ARC. Back then connecting players was tricky, so they approached Total Entertainment Network (TEN), a company that specialised in adding multiplayer modes to popular games. They put together a 2D capture-the-flag concept that Vechey believes was one of the first downloadable multiplayer games. In 1995, Brian Fiete and John Vechey were two college students who were fascinated by the earliest iterations of multiplayer gaming. So how did this happen? How did one studio manage to occupy every corner of gaming, from dial-up downloads to cellphones, from casual gaming portals to Valve’s Orange Box? And how did it go from a three-person indie project to a $650m+ sale to EA? ![]() Whether it was Peggle, Bejeweled, Bookworm or Plants Vs Zombies, whether played on mobile, PC, Facebook, console, inside World of Warcraft, or on a Palm Pilot, there was a time around 2009 where PopCap’s games were ubiquitous, when everyone and their mother would have tried PopCap’s products. For about 10 years, there was one name in casual gaming, and that name was almost Sexy Action Cool. More extraordinary, there’s a very good chance everyone you know, including your parents, have played a PopCap game. There is a very good chance you’ve played a PopCap game. ![]()
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