Seven Questions About Bejeweled

Posted by Jeremy M. Zoss at 11:13 AM Mar 08, 2010

​
Today marks the start of what will hopefully be a long-running weekly column on Joystick Division: Seven Questions. The goal of this column is to provide the reader with the broad-stroke information about a game, so you can learn as much as possible about it in a fairly short time. Typically, these columns will focus on upcoming games, but in this inaugural edition we're focusing on a game that's been around for a long time: Bejeweled. We chatted with Bejeweled creators and PopCap founders Jason Kalpalka and John Vechey to learn what life was life in the early days of Bejeweled and what it's like to work on one of the best-selling games of all time.

When you created Bejeweled/Diamond Mine 10 years ago, what were your expectations for the game? How well were you hoping it would do?

A: We were hoping to sell it to a games portal outright, since sharing in online ad revenues wasn't an option by that point (this was in the midst of the dot-com implosion of 2000). We were hoping to make enough money to cover the cost of building the game and ideally, the cost of creating a second game. In other words, our expectations were pretty modest.

For some perspective, take us back to what your life was like before Bejeweled. What was your company doing and how successful was it?

Well, before Bejeweled, we worked together at Total Entertainment Network/Pogo.com and then separately for a while at various game companies, then teamed up to build what became Bejeweled. We were in our early 20s and had little money... we tried doing piecemeal work for other game makers in order to pay the power bill and eat something other than top ramen and pizza occasionally, but that wasn't much for or very rewarding financially. PopCap was known in those early days by the name "Sexy Action Cool" - inspired by a sign for the Antonio Banderas film "Desperado"... so as a company we didn't do much before Diamond Mine/Bejeweled, and thankfully that was pretty much the first thing we did!

What inspired the name change from Diamond Mine to Bejeweled?

A guy named Eddie Ranchigoda worked in the games group at Microsoft and liked the game but didn't love the name... he suggested we change it to Bejeweled, and the rest is history. Thanks, Eddie!

PopCap is arguably the biggest name in casual games. Were casual games always the intent, or did you ever have designs on making more "hardcore" games?

We're hardcore gamers at heart, pretty nerdy game guys who, if we'd had all the money and resources in the world, would probably have made some insanely complicated space shoot-'em-up RPG or something that would have appealed to half of one percent of the overall consumer base. But we were realistic enough to know that we didn't have those resources and wouldn't be getting them anytime soon, and we all had some experience creating smaller, more broadly appealing games for early online game providers like Pogo.com and Sierra Online.

When did you first realize that Bejeweled was a hit?

Brian Fiete, who co-founded the company along with Jason Kapalka and me, was our primary coder in those days (he's still our chief tech guru). Right after we made the decision to offer a 'deluxe' version of Bejeweled for $19.95, Brian devised a little 'applet' that would cause a "cha-ching!" old school cash register sound every time someone actually ponied up $20 for the game. At first it was great fun to hear it go off... on one occasion the three of us were sitting around watching the film "Clerks" and one of the characters said something like "dude, you'll never get rich sitting around on your ass all day" - and the "cha-ching" sounded and we just fell over laughing... after a couple of days that damned "cha-ching" was going off every minute or two and it was driving us nuts... but that was when we realized we might actually have a hit on our hands :)

After the original game was a hit, which version came next? The cell phone version? In other words, how did the game begin its spread across multiple platforms?

The next evolutionary step for Bejeweled was Bejeweled 2, in 2004...shortly after that we licensed the game for mobile phones. By 2005 the game was on Xbox Live Arcade, the seatbacks of leading airlines, even scratch-off lottery tickets!

Bejeweled lottery tickets is a pretty strange spin-off for a video game. Are there any other strange expansions of the franchise?

We did a 're-skinned' version of Bejeweled for the Pork Advisory Board in which the gems were replaced with pork chops and bacon and so forth... that would probably be the weirdest 'expansion' of Bejeweled... so far!