How do you follow up one of the most iconic games of all time? With a twist.
Bejeweled, the match-three-gems puzzle game, has earned hundreds ofmillions of dollars and cost hapless players billions of man-hours.Wired magazine contributing editor David Kushner asked a founder of publisher PopCap Games in the November issue what it is that makes simple puzzle games so addictive. The company released its latest time sink, Bejeweled Twist, Monday. Kushner's impressions of the game are below.
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By guest blogger David Kushner
Eight years ago, Jason Kapalka and two 21-year-old friends from Seattlemade the perfect puzzle game, a simple grid full of rubies and diamondsand emeralds. The object was to swap the gems around on the grid andtry to match three of the same type to earn points. They called itBejeweled.
The three friends shopped their creation around to online game portalslike Pogo, but received a tepid response. "It's not even really agame," they were told. MSNBC.com offered them $1,500 for the rights.
Instead, Kapalka and crew decided to go it alone, creating an LLC called PopCap and releasing Bejeweled as a freeFlash app in 2001. They had no marketing budget, so they relied on wordof mouth and free trial versions, which gently prompted players to buythe full version, which contained more difficulty levels and online scoreboards.
Fast forward seven years. Half a billion people have spent more than 6billion hours playing Bejeweled, and 10 percent of those have actuallyshelled out their own money to buy it. PopCap, which has grown from agarage outfit to a company with more than 200 employees, has ported the gameto Xbox 360, Playstation 2 and every phone OS imaginable, not to mention PalmPilot, Pocket PC and iPod. You can play it to win cash on gamblingsites, there are Bejeweled-themed casino machines in Vegas, and in Australia,you can even get scratch-off lottery tickets based on it.
Now, PopCap is hoping to hit the jackpot again.
Today, casual gamers will get their twitchy paws on the PC version of BejeweledTwist -- a follow-up that's been four years and a record-setting $1 million in themaking. Twist stays true to the original's unique charms, but radically alters the gameplay. The object of the game is still to make rows and columns of three identical gems. But instead of swapping the positions of two side-by-side gems, you have to rotate two-by-two blocks of gems to make the match.
Kapalka says inspiration came two years ago, when he found anobscure sushi-twisting game for the Palm Pilot. "I wanted to find outmore about it, but wasn't able to," he says. "It was just thisabandoned software that had wandered off onto the web."
The idea of twisting puzzle pieces seemed perfectto riff on for his own title. The key to any classic puzzle game,Kapalka says, is KISS -- keep it simple, stupid.
"Simplicity is the key thing you're goingfor," he says. "It's easy to take an existing game and just add morestuff to it, but adding stuff doesn't make a game more fun. You canmake a lesser game instead."
Of course, Twist packs the requisite influx of eye and ear candy. Flame gemsexplode satisfyingly when you match them. These, and the and bolt-blasting Lightning gems,can be used strategically to explode Bomb gems that tick down whileyou play. Twist has four game types, including the stress-free Zen mode and the panic-inducing, conference-call-friendly Blitz mode, which gives you just five minutes to hit your high score.
At first, the new style feels heretical to hard-core 'jewelers used tothe old familiar rhythms, but it's only minutes before the Twist powerkicks in. Kapalka says the team set out to beef up the luck quotientin the game, with the bombs in particular adding a new sense of dramato the action.
"In Twist, we don't shy away from random factors," hesays, "we build them into the game."
Image courtesy PopCap
See also:
- Bejeweled Creator Spills Secrets of Addictive Games
- Bejeweled, Warcraft Combine to Form World's Most Addictive Game
- PopCap Game's Budget Sets Record
- Review: Peggle Nights Deals New Hit of Same Addictive Gameplay
- Peggle Dev's Tricks to Make Games Addictive
This story was edited from the original version to properly reflect Bejeweled Twist's release date.
