Classic Game Postmortem - Bejeweled

[Music] well hello everybody my name is Jason Kapooka I'm the thanks I'm the co-founder and chief creative officer of PopCap Games and I've been invited here to talk about the post-mortem of bejeweled so I have to admit them a little bit nervous about this because I don't do a lot of presentations to begin with but this one in particular was a little overwhelming when I was asked about participating in it the first thing when I mentioned is someone who a conversation went something like this you know I'm talking on the classic game post-mortems and they said oh yeah what game I said what what game do you think I mean be jeweled and they're like oh oh yeah oh okay I guess maybe that is a classic game in some way but then I looked at the list of other games and his stuff like maniac mansion and out-of-this-world and doom and then pac-man of all things

which although and that's I mean that's the first thing that comes up when you google pac-man so you know you don't get you don't get that for bejeweled oh well actually maybe you might but so it's a little bit overwhelming and then of course we'll right mm-hmm so the only thing made me feel a little bit better than I mentioned that you know what this was my first reaction of course was they were not worthy but it felt like Justin Bieber getting a Lifetime Achievement Award but then someone pointed out the marble madness was also in the lists and you know no offense to to mark Kearney or anything but I hate marble madness in my arcade back at home someone had poured a coke onto the marble madness machine and so the trackball was always it's a little bit sticky and so you could you just would fly off the edge all the time whenever you played it so so I felt okay I felt like we could be in the company of Marble Madness because you know pretty soon they'd be lighting in gorf and stuff like that so anyway so I

decided that the the best thing I could do is present the history of bejeweled but tell people some things and maybe they don't actually know I have a feeling that there's actually going to be stuff in this that even people in our company don't know and I can 100% guarantee there's stuff in this that our PR guys don't want people to know so I can guarantee you'll include at least one never-before secret and also one complete lie but I'm not going to tell you which is which so we celebrated bejeweled 10th anniversary last year which is kind of surprised we it took us well before I even realize it and said oh yes 10 years old huh how about that and I didn't really went by so fast the strange thing when you thought about that is it's a it's a once a short period of time in a very long one and I keep hearing people who come up and say oh yeah I played bejeweled in high school and if you're Miley Cyrus I can believe that but you people like this

coming up and saying that they played bejeweled in high school and so I you know this can't be possible you tell no no I don't think you did and they're like yeah I did I was like no no we didn't but then I realized that myself certain games have kind of taken on a bit of an iconic status beyond their actual reality for example I'm quite sure I played World of Warcraft in high school you know the the you know the the wikipedia says that couldn't have happened but yeah it feels like that so in a sense some games have you know become iconic enough that they you know that they become bigger than they really are and for better or worse I think bejeweled has has done that in 2001 when I told people I made bejeweled usually they say so what yeah is that I don't know in 2011 usually the response is is different it's sort of as if you've and it's almost as if in some cases they said yeah oh yeah what else did you invent the paperclip you know it's that's been

around forever so yeah so it I don't know if it'd be jeweled is art but it has sort of achieved a sort of weird ubiquity in pop culture which you know I I can take some credit for it but obviously part of it is you know weird forces that in the general site-geist that we don't have that much control over yeah I'm not gonna go in for too much of the sort of stats on bejeweled because I'm assuming that most people who showed up here have some idea of what the game is but these are a couple ones we have about the total units sold 50 million supposedly five hundred million players and seven billion hours of play which I'm told is eight hundred thousand years so that's quite a lot and yeah so but it all started a much more humble way which was with me working at the total entertainment network here in San Francisco back in 1995 and I started there as a as a writer slash editor I became later on

a game producer and our job was to look for online games to bring to people that they could play on their 24-bit K modem things so these are a couple shots of me from earlier days yeah okay I'll go over I'm just gonna skip past that this is one of the other co-founders John beachy who we met well I'd initially met him and the other co-founder of pop gap around 1997 when they'd invented a online game called arc and it was my job to Wine and Dine them and then to produce their game and to get it up on 210 it was a bit of a surprise because at that time they were about eighteen and so all my usual ploys which were to take people to bars were not feasible it was another shot of of John back in 2000 and here's here's John and Brian we didn't have too many other shots of

Brian that I was comfortable to show but that's a pretty good one and this was a game attacker achieved arc which was yeah it's kind of like Counter Strike in 1997 but with little saucers instead of terrorists there's a pretty fun kind of you know a team-based shooter at a time when that was not really being done very much so yeah I thought they were really clever they had a lot of really good ideas about games so we kept in touch over the next couple of years I was working at 10 they went on to go to work at one net for Sierra and in around 2000 we all decided that we were sick of our jobs we could do it better and so we quit and started a company order of our apartment's this is this is mine John's was was a lot Messier and so yeah we we could quit our jobs and started a brand new company and that company was called sexy action cool there's a long story about where that

name came from but basically it comes down to the fact that there was a movie poster for Antonio Banderas is film desperado back in a basement suite I lived in and the tagline at the top said sexy action cool and that became a weird inside joke and the other big aspect was that the URL was free obviously so the other thing that most people don't know about PopCap's original years was that our first game was not bejeweled but foxy poker which you can see there this was our ill-fated foray into pornography where the theory was we would make a strip poker game and then sell that engine to porn companies and use that money to fund our awesome game ideas so we did actually make it and release it I think I actually have it here so just one second yes it's safe for work don't worry

there we go so it was basically video poker with the cartoon character who would strip after you after you got enough money so it was not bad as actually as as video poker went we couldn't actually bring ourselves to do any pornography though so the the character there never actually becomes fully nude she ends up in a state sort of like an Austin power movie where there's always a bunch of objects sort of obscuring anything that might be naughty so this was this was good in terms of not getting us in trouble with the authorities but it disappointed a lot of the players of the game who would spend quite a while you said spend multiple hours and then at the end you know the payoff was not what they really were hoping for so yeah so we did this initially and it would add a little bit of popularity on you know other websites we are we are hosting it on but eventually what we found was that there

you can see at a later stage what we actually learned was that if you're gonna be sleazy you really you really want to do it all the way and so if you're gonna do a strip poker game you should probably have some nudity in it and the people we were dealing with in that industry also didn't really didn't really feel like the kinds of people we wanted to spend the rest of our lives doing business with so we decided that maybe we should get into a different industry something like family games however this was the next lesson we learned is that when you've incorporated the company called sexy action cool you have a few things that will haunt you for a while so for several years after this we were we were using the pop cap name and logo and our website but according to our banks and so forth we were still sexy action cool doing business as PopCap

Games button still you know that would be what people check said for at least several years and as a Canadian I also had a work visa that said I worked for an Internet company called sexy action cool so I've had some troubles with the US border guards over the years and they definitely I got a few extra questions I think at the border due to that so that's a lesson to be learned for people is think about that name yeah so eventually we switched to pop captain here's a couple of early logos yeah well I did all these by the way if you're curious I'm available for local design and this was I think my first business card which still has my original address here in San Francisco pretty shortly after that I moved up to Vancouver and we started you know the office in Seattle and so on anyway so after we decided to make that change in direction we did our first game and the game idea was to do something that was a simple web-based game in Java mostly our idea

was that we would sell it back to some of the companies we'd worked for before like pogo.com or one net and you know because we thought we could do a quicker and more efficiently than those organizations were doing it so we made our first game and it was called diamond mine this is the this was originally in for bejeweled as some people might know but before I get into the details of how that was made I I'm gonna answer the question of who we ripped off bejeweled from there's been a lot of speculation on this topic and I follow with great interest over the years most recently there are some people who thought that we ripped it off from our old Russian game called shrieky which was like 1973 on some sort of like Russian mainframe computer I guess I've never heard of it before now but it's possible Tetris was a common when people brought up although of course you know the game is nothing like Tetris whatsoever but then there's a game called Tetris attack which apparently does involve swapping of pieces only on a side-to-side basis interesting

again not the game that we were familiar with at all and most recently at dinner two nights ago when we mentioned we did bejeweled the waitresses first response was oh yeah like that was a ripoff of columns right and I hadn't thought of that but it kind of is although columns was you just had the block of three pieces two went that fell down a lot Tetris and you could sort of shift the position of the of the gems in there so yeah I'm sure it had some influence on the whole genre but it was not the game that we were conscious of as an influence and of course some academic writers have gone on to create entire family trees of all the match three games that influenced bejeweled and then were influenced from there which I found really fascinating because I hadn't heard of any of them I'm quite curious to check out panel de pon at some point but it wasn't the conscious influence I can tell you who we actually ripped off the jeweled from and this was because John beachy one day came to us and said well what we do and he said I found a cool game and he showed it to us

and it was called colors game and it was a terrible game it was an awful game and we told John this is stupid what are you talking about he said no you got to play it it's kind of cool and so we played it for a little bit that well now it's not cool is it but the mechanic is cool and we said well I don't know the problem with colors game is that it it's a phantom game we've not been able to relocate it at any time even using things like the internet archives and wayback machine no one has actually ever found it so I figured this is as good a time as any you know if anybody here knows who made colors game we'd be quite curious to hear because it literally has no proof I could only rien I sort of designed this as a reenactment of what it looks like this is actually probably better than colors game looked Heller's game was it wasn't even in Java I think was in JavaScript so I think you had to refresh the page after every move so it didn't actually animate or have sound or anything like that I don't know

if it had a score or an end condition but John thought the the matching condition was kind of cool and so we thought well okay and Brian who was our programmer and tech lead he went off and wrote a much better engine in Java that had animation and stuff like that so yeah we did add a few things to colors game so we feel that we've evolved the gameplay a little bit the big thing that I was focus on initially was the playing pieces because colors game was a bunch of featureless squares of color it's hard to play even without animation and so on because the squares were difficult to tell apart and God knows if you're color blind have been much worse so I thought it would be a good idea to have different shapes because you're looking at basically a pattern recognition thing you'd it would be easier you know to look at different shapes but I was also big believer in themes and so I wanted to make sure that it was something that had a had a clear visual theme that made sense and so I started thinking about you know what comes in groups of seven you know that has radically different colors and shapes but you know still hangs together

as one family and the obvious answer was of course fruits that was wrong because the problem is most fruits there's not actually finding seven different colors of fruit is actually kind of hard and finding seven different shapes of fruit is also hard fruits tend to be kind of roundish for the most part so instead of a whole bunch of squares you had a whole bunch of circles so then my next thought was gems which seems like a better idea but just finding a bunch of actual gemstones on the internet yielded a bunch of things of not very interesting color and shape so well so wasn't very good so what I ended up finding was that the best results came from just drawing circles squares triangles and so forth simple geometric shapes but those are really boring so I decided what if I made those squares and triangles look a little bit like gems by drawing some facets on them and indeed that was kind of what I did so these were the this was the first pass of gems for what became

bejeweled as you can see there's a few kind of ones that hit the cutting room floor towards the bottom there but a lot of them are still the classic shapes that we use in all the games since then and so this is the actual first iteration of diamond mine and I think I can actually have played that too yeah so as you can see this is gonna work yep so a lot of the rules were pretty much the same as they are now you swap three things and they disappear the big thing that was added to later iterations were the power gems in this case if you make rows of four or five gems in a row nothing nothing very interesting happens so but obviously Mastry was a good deal and swapping and gems falling all that stuff turned out to be kind of a pretty

workable idea yeah now the key thing that in retrospect that we came up with for bejeweled that we didn't know at the time was the not just the timer bar the first thing we did we put a timer bar into the game because they felt the original game which was super crude you know didn't have a timer and therefore wasn't a real game and so forth so we put in a timer because we thought that's how you make it into a real arcade game and that did work but at the last minute we decided all right let's leave level 1 as a tutorial without a timer so that people can get the hang of it you know before they play the real game as it turned out most people didn't really understand that there was another level besides level 1 or that it was meaningful and so they played that tutorial pretty much for the entire time they played the game and that became the classic version of bejeweled was this untimed mode so that was a bit of a mistake but turned out to be a

fortuitous one because I think again with the benefit of hindsight bejeweled in his classic untime form is much more like solitaire than is like Tetris it's a game that you you do have to pay attention and use your brain a little bit but at the same time it ends at a fairly random point you can't really control to any extent when you're gonna run out of moves any more than you can control they'll come of a typical solitaire game once you follow very simple rules so you know and as a result it's not that surprising that bejeweled and solitaire appeal to a lot of the same kinds of people you know what we've come to call casual gamers and which back in the day we called my mom so since this is like post mortem I figured I better do the classic the scenario in which we look over what went right and what went wrong in the process I've got enough time to go over that so yeah this was the first thing that went right is we ignored all the expert advice that we got I'm not sure if this is going to be

what everyone would want to do but it sort of worked for us in this case we talked to some people that I won't name and they said you know this isn't even a really a game again that what I just described about the solitaire thing they did not see as a benefit they saw that as a weakness the fact that the game you know ended because of luck rather than scale seem to make it irrelevant and of course in retrospect now I've spent a lot of time thinking about this and I can say you know games of luck are not really bad I mean in fact for the better part of human history people have played games of luck quite a bit and continue to do so now the only area where games of chance are not commonly accepted is in fact basically you know this conference center computer games have been designed as games of skill and I think a lot of that comes from their roots in the arcade where you know that's kind of how it was structured you put in another quarter you have to keep

you know you've had to play a bit more you got a little bit better so your time would last a little bit longer so they have that DNA of being skilled games and I think that still continues to flavor what people think computer games should be like these days so games of chance are considered something different there's something that maybe you find in a slot machine in Las Vegas but not something that you'd imagine you know in an actual video game so that was the first thing is but at the time of course we didn't think about that way we just sort of said my mom liked it so you know that's ok the second thing that I think we did right was we were completely oblivious to any sort of reality in the market we started the company and I think late 2000 and some of you may recall that there were other things happening in the internet space around that time there's a few more things here now again luckily for us we didn't really understand any of that I was aware of the fact that most of my friends didn't have jobs anymore and we're going you know back to the Midwest

but we didn't really think that maybe this was not the best time to start a new comm business so again another piece of what actually went right for us because if we'd been paying attention to this we probably would have gone into some other kind of business and certainly not an internet-based company the next thing that went right also doesn't necessarily seem like the most obvious one which is that we were quite unsuccessful with trying to sell the game in the way we thought we would our initial plan for bejeweled was to again take it in and sell it to the companies we worked for and talked with and you know get a flat payment and but those companies they won't name said no and instead one company Microsoft did agree to lease the game they said we can't afford thirty thousand dollars for this this diamond mine game but we could lease it for $1,500 a month Mme and we

said well okay and we did our calculations and we thought you know there's three of us there's five hundred dollars a month if we make another 20 games we'll be we'll be doing great so yeah and then of course in retrospect if we've sold the game for thirty thousand dollars things would be a little bit different now so I suppose you can take that as you know in the long run you say own your own IP all that sort of thing we didn't think of it that way at the time but it turned out pretty well but I guess the the last thing they'd say would that went right was a little bit more relevant to things you can do now which is we did make a game that we liked mmm there's there's a lot of games there floating around this space that were kind of advergaming so and they were kind of just knocked out by people quickly with idea of you know we'll put this thing out we'll make some money we'll do what we really want to do and we'd already done that of course with Oxley poker so we made a decision that you know we're not going to do that so if we're gonna make a game we're

gonna make a game that we take seriously that we're gonna make that you know we ourselves like to play and so if and that's something that we've carried on since that day a PopCap is that even if we're making games that are supposed to appeal to everybody to the soccer moms and board secretaries and whatever else we don't to make a game that we ourselves don't like so we're always the first and most important audience for any of our games so yeah and that that as I've said where we did use my mom to actually test out the games but in the long run we are actually making the games for ourselves not for not for her okay what's that thing doing up there anyway so yeah that eventually that kind of led to our core game design belief which is that if you're a skilled craftsman you can indeed make games that you don't enjoy and probably be successful doing it but it'll be you'll never make a really great game because you just won't have that sort of instinctive feeling for what you're doing and you will kind of

suck now as for what went wrong with bejeweled well we do have a few things there the first one is that I decided to name all the games I worked on after Canadian and classic rock bands so that led to some unusual names and in this case diamond mine was actually named after the song by the Canadian rock band blue rodeo which is a pretty good song by the way later on I would name our next game big money after a song from the band Rush so that was rush at the time so yeah there's still quite good band but that turned out to be not the best name and so some of you may not have heard of diamond mine before and I wondering when the game actually turned individual and the answer to that is Microsoft and bedazzled so when we license the game to

Microsoft they didn't like the name they had some concerns about it their primary one was that they wanted to have a unique name for the game on their website that wasn't used elsewhere and so they suggested a bunch of alternate names for the game that they wanted and we hated all of them but I especially hated bejeweled because it was exactly at the same time as the Brendan Fraser movie bedazzle that was coming out and I was sure it was like a really lame topical reference that was going to be totally dated and forgotten about in about two months after the fact so that was true but of course it was the other way around as far as which became sort of a dated pop culture reference so yes hate I really hated name bejeweled I hated it even more after we had an interview with old man Murray which some people may remember as kind of the precursor to Penny Arcade it was a very bitter humour site back in the day and I think the main writers have gone on to do a few little games like portal or something like that but yeah they didn't

interview with us and asked us about bejeweled except they continually referred to it as be Jude and kept asking us what we had against the Jews and of course immediately after they did that I couldn't help but think of that every single time I saw the word bejeweled so it took a few years before I was able to realize that in fact bejeweled was a much better name than diamond mine just like tobe Hooper you know took years before he admitted that Texas Chainsaw Massacre was a better name for his movie than his original title which was headcheese so yes so eventually we did decide bejeweled is just a better name and we switched diamond mine to be jeweled on all the different sites however we had a price to pay for that the the price was that Microsoft had to agree to the let us do that and we ended up giving them the rights to put any sponsored version of bejeweled up on their site basically forever so the next

time you see a really horrible looking bejeweled addre game that's why so I think we hit the nadir with Tyson chicken bejeweled which had a lot of chicken pieces replacing the gems there's another a couple other ones I think there's a vodka bejeweled at one point I think we nixed which one we had a prenup proper you know dog food would be jeweled at one point too there was a there was a pork board one as well which I actually kind of liked because I wanted them to actually rename the game be porked but they didn't do that mm-hmm so what else went wrong the single screen UI which now looks pretty bad that was as a holdover from the days at Pogo where you kind of had to fit all the UI onto one screen because the download size was so ridiculously small that you can you didn't want to add another 30 K worth of graphics by having a title screen or a separate option

screen or anything so you kind of crammed all your UI onto the side of your game you know and that it made sense at one time but in retrospect it ended up making for a pretty ugly yeah user interface and one that was kind of confusing people in terms of which skill level they were supposed to pick or any that sort of thing so yes by the time we got to be jeweled 2 we had realized that a little more minimal UI was better and so we kind of gotten rid of a lot of the clutter that leaves the other problem we had which is multiple game difficulties that turned out to being a bit of an advantage in that most people didn't really understand the other game difficulties and stuck with that on time version but we didn't really understand that at the time and so most of the games we did after that for a while we kind of put a lot of different modes and a lot of different difficulty levels in there and so here's a screen from big money and yeah I'm kind of not sure what I was thinking when we did this because I have no idea what game I'm supposed to play here this is generally my big beef

with difficulty levels is that if you come into a game that you've never played before how do you know what level you want to play it at and is it easy is it hard even games are familiars owners like shooters often have radically different you know difficulty levels and it's a super high pressure thing to make a decision that you know at the beginning of the game you may not be able to change the difficulty later on like I don't know is it easy is it hard and sometimes just the terminology may make it hard to figure out you know if you change the titles from easy normal hard to you know you know was you loser and okay guy you know then that changes how people feel about which difficulty level to pick anyway so yeah that was another lesson learned and we kind of got rid of difficulty levels in future bejeweled games just because they they are bad and the final thing that I think I would say went wrong with bejeweled was that I had a big fondness for themes in games there were a lot of games there

they were very kind of basic and minimal as far as their UI went I always thought that it was a good idea to have really colorful themes and characters in all these games and so I tried my hardest to make sure that was the case for all of our titles including bejeweled so diamond mine originally had a bit of a a mining theme so when you when you lost it would say cave-in and theoretically the idea was that the cave you're in collapsed and so forth the best I can say for this this attempt at a theme is that most people didn't even notice it and it completely went away by the time he got to bejeweled - which is good because instead of sort of Spacey New Age backgrounds we would have had a lot of caves I guess but it was a still strong believer that the games needed a strong coherent theme and that led to some issues later on down the road sometimes it was good I think bookworm for example worked well because I've added a I think a very fun you know coherent theme to word games which are often a little bit abstract

in other cases it didn't work so well where peggle was originally going to be a Norse mythology themed game called Thunder ball in which Thor led his pet goat on a journey to Asgard that's somehow involved a lot of pigs and bouncing balls and stuff we have said the goat was kind of cute though so I'm kind of sad that we lost the goat but yeah ultimately for pagal at some point we basically said you know this is this is kind of stupid why don't we just had some lobsters and unicorns and obviously that worked out a little bit better so that was bejeweled so I guess the question is is what happened after we finished the game and well what happened was we kind of forgot about it and moved on it went up on Microsoft's gaming zone site we got paid $1,500 a month and we sort of moved on to a bunch of other games and didn't think about it too much until a couple months later where it started to have a lot of users

at that time it had 20,000 30,000 user Peaks which was more than any other game on the gaming zone and people were starting to say huh this is kind of unusual what's going on with this game so you know we started paying more attention to bejeweled then we went back and said well maybe we should do something more with it this was exacerbated by the fact that around this time the advertising market was collapsing and Microsoft whose site was entirely dependent on advertising was starting to get a little bit antsy about where they're getting money from and so we're starting to kind of say maybe the next game maybe won't pay you $1,500 a month for that maybe a thousand maybe so we're starting to think that we needed to reconsider our business model and indeed we did we decided to do bejeweled deluxe which would was I guess it's hardly the first downloadable game but it was it was definitely that I think one of the first of the new breed of downloadable games that helped to spark the you know the casual genre a largely the idea for this came from

Howard Tomlinson who was a English mobile programmer who did Palm Pilot games and done a lot of shareware back in the day and so when we were doing the game the deluxe version you know we were unsure of ourselves our thought was why were people you know about buy this game they can play it online for free and he said they will he said how much we sell it foreign and I think I said $2.99 and John said $5.99 and Howard said $19.99 and he said what he said if you price that $2.99 don't think it's crap if you face it at $19.99 they'll be sure it's good so that turned out that turned out to be the right answer as a as it went on so yeah so bejeweled deluxe we did as a downloadable game as a anecdote about the development of it it was also their first introduction of the bejeweled guy who has the voice that says excellent and so forth individual one that was me with a lot of heavy processing but it wasn't me for any of the other games so I'm just clearing that up

it's was voice actors with a lot about processing for bejeweled two three twists etc etc and the development time for the first Java bejeweled was I don't even know it was less than a month it wasn't very long and John do you remember about a month bejeweled deluxe was around three months I think approximately so we thought that was a lot of time back then as it turned out you know that it got a little longer later on here's a nice little photo as the first bejeweled deluxe was actually 1.4 megabytes which meant it was probably the last game that can be distributed on floppy disks so these were some of the disks that we had made up as sort of promotional items to give to people at conferences and I think one of those was we gave that to I think Robert coffee at computer gaming world and he kind of laughed and then went back and they end up writing about it and giving it a some sort of award that they made up and so I was kind of cool the other story that I have to tell about the early days of vigil deluxe is the caching story which some people may

have heard when we first started selling the downloadable game Brian our programmer went and wrote a program so that every time someone actually you know purchase it it would play a sound effect on one of our computers at which you know my cash register sound of a caching and so he put it there and then the story that John has is he was talking to his aunt your mom I don't know someone and they're they're telling was like John you can't make any money sitting on the couch and from the other room came this caching caching and he said yes I can so anyway yeah the kitchens started coming fairly fast and furious and so we were pretty sure that that downloadable model was gonna work we weren't totally sure why but it was doing all right so moving down the bejeweled franchise line we had bejeweled - which came out I think in 2004 so yeah that obviously we allowed us the opportunity to fix a lot of the problems with the first bejeweled and like the UI and so forth and

graphics that I didn't draw and also add some of the things like power gems which were a pretty big addition the we added we had a lot of other things that we tried for bejeweled - a lot of kind of negative pieces we had bombs and spiky things and boulders that you couldn't match and the important lesson we learn from those was that they didn't make the game any more fun they made it more complex but nobody really liked them so we decided that we wanted to avoid the fate of some some titles like Tetris that create these variants that are different but not actually better than the original and so that's kind of in the bar we've tried to set for bejeweled over the years is that if we're going to add stuff to it to make sure it's stuff that that is universally improving the game that nobody nobody ever wants to take out if people had said after playing bejeweled - you know can I play it in classic mode I like to play it in bejeweled one mode I would have thought that that was a big failure I think there was one single person who did say that and said you know I like the rules better in bejeweled one but his only one

guy and he was kinda stupid the dead and anyway the development time for bejeweled - of course was getting a little bit longer and I think that was just about two years which we felt was over Aegis Li long at the time little did we know that later on that wouldn't seem so bad yeah speaking of later on we did bejeweled twist which came out in 2007 I think and that game was a learning experience for us in a couple ways that took at least three years to do and the lesson learned there's longer is not always better and we tried some stuff with bejeweled twist that it's I wouldn't say it's a failure but it definitely turned out to be mechanics that a lot of bejeweled players did not particularly like as a game by itself I think it's a good one as a bejeweled game it doesn't quite feel right and so it's done all right but it feels like it's a little bit out of step with what people are expecting

from visual games yes three years along three years then somewhere around that time we did our first well we'd had mobile versions of bejeweled over the years but most haven't been done by external parties like Electronic Arts or so on so we did our first version of bejeweled for the iPhone around 2008 and that turned out to work really well we kind of knew that bejeweled will work well on the iPhone because we'd had versions for Palm Pilots years ago and so we kind of knew that touch mechanic was pretty good and we felt that it would be a good match for the iPhone as it and it's turned out to do very well the one the really interesting thing we had about the development of bejeweled for the iPhone was the fact that your finger is not a stylus and in fact people's fingers are comparatively big and clumsy and this is a problem that plagues a lot of iPhone games is that they try to port games require a lot more precision than people's fingers are capable of and there's a lot of stuff that goes on on successful iPhone apps

where they kind of minimize or get around that problem for typing for example you know there's an awful lot of predictive stuff that Apple does to try and make sure that you you press the right you know letter and so for bejeweled on iphone we ended up with an equivalent which we called fat finger detection which meant that if you pressed if you play bejeweled on the iPhone and you try and make a swiping motion to swap a gem in an area even if you kind of miss the actual match we'll look at that area and say okay you know there's a match in the upper-right quadrant you swiped an area that doesn't actually have a match but we think you probably meant to do this and then we'll actually do the swap that we think you meant to do you have to be pretty careful with that because if you if you're too generous with it you know you'll you'll tap something in the bottom left and then a match happens in the top right and the game feels like it's playing itself but most the time people don't notice it because there you go oh yeah of course I meant to do that so that's it's one of those little things that actually makes a huge

difference and most people don't notice that unless you turn it off or take it out at which point the game just suddenly starts feeling kind of clumsy and awkward why do it for time okay so yeah so here's a few stats on bejeweled iPhone it's yes sold a bunch and later on when we get to visual blitz you'll see that we we have an interesting crossover with that a lot of people play visual blitz on their iPhone as well as on Facebook so we felt that it's it's kind of unique in being one of the very few games that does have this ability to cross over from one platform to another so yeah we something like yeah so I'm like half more than half of the people who play bejeweled blitz on their iPhone also play it on Facebook and that leads us to be jewel blitz which came out I think and I think I said 2009 but it might have been late 2008 yeah now bejeweled blitz was was a bit of a reaction to what had happened on bejeweled twist and that I didn't want to do another three year you know

bejeweled title so I want to do something kind of something fast and at the same time our business guy Dennis kept coming up to me and saying you know those Facebook games I hear they're pretty big here Facebook games are going to be big and initially we'd sort of just kept blowing them off and sayings like yeah yeah that's like zombies biting ninjas that's all stupid but eventually I was thinking okay maybe he's right maybe there's something there we should perhaps try and do something we were hindered by a couple things one of them was the fact that we didn't have a single flash programmer in the entire company so we had that that required a bit of creative thought and what we ended up with was we had one outsourced version of bejeweled 2 in flash that didn't really work so we had never released it and and we had one customer sport guy Jason Payne who had decided to learn flash in his spare time and so I said well okay that's good enough we'll get those we'll get those two guys together and we'll try and do something kind of quick and dirty for Facebook so yeah

they took about three months to get that done but you know it was pretty rough around the edges but maguet the idea across later on of course we needed to recruit a little more heavily to to fill up the necessary vacancies that we had but that turned out we don't have that problem anymore it's okay it's okay so yeah so bejeweled blitz came out and there's some more stats here it's it's it's it's done quite well and although we developed it quickly that was refreshing change from three year development cycles but what we're now discovering of course is that with social games that development cycle never actually ends so people were on bejeweled blitz you know two years ago can still be on bejeweled blitz because it's you know it's it's a service it's not a it's not a fire-and-forget and product that you just release and forget about is something we had to keep adding

to and evolving and so that's that's been a different kind of development for us as well so trying to transform bejeweled from the kind of game it was in 2000 to the kind of game it has to be to be relevant in 2011 has been a bit of a real learning curve for us and there's a bunch of stats I don't know there's a lot of stuff there a lot of gems now it's mortal again stats yeah then bejeweled 3 vigil 3 came out in 2010 that was kind of a parallel development with things like bejeweled blitz and there's kind of in some ways maybe maybe not the last gasp but certainly one of the holdovers from our older way of doing games where he had a fairly long development cycle and you had a single product rather than an ongoing service or you know set of products so that took about two years so we got better but it still still a little a little a little long given that

kind of world we're seeing now but yeah but we're pretty happy with the jewel 3 we did feel like we we didn't alter the mechanics dramatically but we felt that we got back to the core of what people liked about bejeweled that maybe we had drifted away from with the jewel twist and then finally just I think a week or two ago we released bejeweled blitz live for Xbox Live which was again kind of an experiment and bringing the blitz mechanix to Xbox where you don't have the Facebook social graph but you have a different social graph which is your Xbox Live friends so it's all bit early for us to tell whether that's going to be successful but it lends itself to a different kind of social interaction people on Xbox Live don't really play asynchronously they play synchronously they get together and they play at the same time and the whole thing is set up so that people can play in the same room and talk to each other and all that where Facebook is set up for asynchronous play where you sort of play and other people play whenever it's convenient what's next for bejeweled I

guess I have a few more minutes I'll try and finish up here and then leave a bit of time for questions well I'm not sure exactly what I can say that's that's that's not a secret but I can promise you this there's a popular game plate of the PopCap offices called bejeweled blitz carnage which is a drinking game that anyone who goes to the local tavern the two bells is likely to spot happening so you can see all us sitting there with iPhones playing bejeweled blitz and I'm replicating here for the benefit of anyone at GDC you might have an iPhone and bejeweled the rules the official drinking game rules for bejeweled blitz carnage so everyone starts playing a a game of bejeweled blitz on their iPhone at the same time and at the end whoever has the lowest score subtracts that from the person with the highest score and has to take a drink for every 10,000 point difference so there I think the record I've seen is

there was a case where the high score was 400,000 in the low score was about 10,000 so that can add up to a lot and in some cases that also means that the loser will drop out of the game fairly quickly thereafter so now that may seem like a joke but it actually did lead into some interesting thoughts for the future of bejeweled and that I don't know about the drinking part necessarily for everybody but it was interesting to Bill to play that game in a group experience somewhere outside of your computer room at home so being able to do that in a in a bar or in a restaurant starts leading to a lot of interesting ideas for things like geolocation and so on so I think we're like we might start seeing things like that I think that it's no one has quite nailed geolocation games yet but I have a feeling that it might be interesting to experiment with that with the Jordan and yes now they have a few seconds left I will I will give away a secret bejeweled blitz players may be familiar with the cat's-eye gem that causes a cat head to

fly out of the screen and shoot lasers to blow stuff up so I'm going to reveal the actual identity of the laser cat it's my cat her name is snackers and she has a secret cameo in every single bejeweled game to date so that's a secret nobody knows yeah and so in closing I guess that the final thought I have about you know being allowed to come up here and speak of a bejeweled as a classic game is that I do feel it's quite an honor that our game is even considered a classic alongside a lot of the ones that are that are in this list at 10 years old it's certainly be you know the youngest of those games so I kind of hope that in maybe another 10 or 20 years they'll invite us back to give another post-mortem of the next 20 years of bejeweled so the image that keeps coming to my head is at the end of Saving Private Ryan where Matt Damon has been saved and everyone else is dead and Tom Hanks you know whispers in his ear

and you know earn this and then that Damon has to go on to you know lead a good life to justify the sacrifice everyone made so yes I'm hoping will will earn the honor of being considered a classic game with what we do with the jeweled in the future so so I'm told there's a couple of microphones back in the aisles here so if people want to ask questions I think we have a few minutes for that I have a question okay who are you oh yeah I got high in the early versions of the game how much of AI did you have to determine what gems would drop and make sure there were moves available for players and how did that evolve over later additions the question was was there any AI in the early versions of the game that sort of selected which gems fell into make sure

you still have Ballad moves and the answer is none in the in the earlier versions of the game there was no AI of any sort to do that and if you ran out of moves you ran out of moves it would just say if it was the standard game it would just say out of moves in your game ended it was a time game it would say no more moves and all the gems would fall off and you get a new board that would drop in that was a little bit inelegant and so in later versions like bejeweled 2 and so and later there is AI that checks in the in the untimed version you still run out of moves in the time version we figure you've got enough of a problem with whatever clock is counting down so it looks for it makes sure that whenever new gems fall in that there's at least one potential match available on the board after that some people believe that there's more sophisticated logic going on in terms of trying to set people up with certain kinds of moves or making it easier or harder but there really isn't it's pretty straightforward any other questions nope

oh wait someone's moving up well I had a question about the sequel's just with the first one I mean the basic concept of bejeweled is relatively simple so it didn't take very long why did the sequel's take so much longer you had two three year development times well the question was why did all those sequels take so long good question well I mean part of it became that we as they became more complex in terms of some of the subtle things about them it became it took a lot more time part of the thing that we're trying to a pop gap is make sure that games are simple but fun and as it turns out it sometimes simplicity takes longer than complexity so some of those games you would have seen much more complex versions of them at one year in and by the time two years rolled around they're actually simpler so the

sad truth is that sometimes a lot of that time was spent doing things that didn't work out or that got you know tried and then removed so it's it's it's sad because it's not evident so you don't get to see the stuff that got taken out and but at the end you know that we feel that you know keep striving for simplicity is kind of the direction we want to go in as a company and so we're willing to spend a bit more time to reach that any more questions anyone else okay yeah what did you guys think of a puzzle class was I surprised you guys or just a path you guys didn't decide didn't want to go down and the question is what do we think of Puzzle Quest My Love Puzzle Quest I think that's it's a great game yeah we've sometimes have there been some games have come out that are there's been a number of clones and stuff of bejeweled I'm not really fond of the ones that don't add anything or that are just or that are worse than the original game but again my puzzle quest I thought was

great because it added something that we honestly would never have come up with ourselves so it really was super cool so yeah yeah we're big fans all right this guy yeah I've been playing visual twists quite a while what a lot and I wondering why is not possible to moving both directions the question the question was in bejeweled blitz why you're not allowed or rather vidual twist why you're not allowed to rotate the gems in the counterclockwise direction and it won't make much more sense I think and the answer is you're fired but but Joan Veatch is gonna mean is gonna give me a hundred bucks for this yeah that was a actually the Baxter and that was that that was the first question everyone asks about bejeweled twist is why you couldn't rotate the gems in both directions and it was it was the first

thing we actually tried and it actually made the game much much worse and that it created a much larger possibility space that moves and you most people would just stare paralyzed at the screen trying to figure out what to do next so but it didn't keep people from asking that question regularly every week or so and so I started threatening to fire anyone who ever asks that question again so he is fired now okay in terms of the casual audience have you noticed your place becoming more sophisticated over the years and how sophisticated do you think the audience can take like in terms of gameplay today was a question there about I notice the difference between the casual audience and the hardcore audience oh no just just over the years have you noticed your player based kind of training up with taking more and more complex game types or do you think the audience like from 10 you or 5 even is kind of the same as today okay the question was whether the audience has for casual games has gotten more sophisticated over the years that's

an odd question I'd say that I'd say yes and no I would say that on the one hand clearly they have in that you know some of our games in the last couple years like plants vs. zombies in particular are quite sophisticated by comparison to our earlier titles and audience seems to be you know okay with with that at the same time at the same time I would say that in some ways some of the audience has gotten less sophisticated you've got people on iPhone and Facebook now who are you know very very casual gamers even by our standards and they don't for them you they wanted games are even simpler than the ones we were doing 10 years ago because they're you know they're either very unfamiliar with games or they're playing on a bus with one hand or something like that and so oddly in those cases were actually thinking about games they have to be made even simpler if you look at some like Angry Birds you know that's that's a quite a simple game and you know I think that's to his benefit I don't think making that game more complex would have made it more popular so I say that we seem to go in two directions you've got a trend towards more sophisticated titles at the

same time you have these brand-new relatively naive you know people who are starting to play games who've never played any sort of game before and they are kind of looking for very simple games so yeah I don't think the simple answer one way or the other hi considering your development time on how big will your teams and how much what's the conversation of the team and also the second question says um how much time did you guys spend on level designs or evently how much time do we spend on level designs for how big the team are considering the long development time I got the question was it for them how big was your team with develop the game and also how much time you spend doing the level design or was it randomized I can answer how much time we spend on level design which is very very very little because there's not really a lot of levels in any of the

bejeweled games we spent some time on puzzle design in some of the games like bejeweled - in terms of the overall size of the teams that hasn't changed too much over the years they obviously the first game was two or three people and to be honest most of the later games have been only slightly larger they've been maybe maybe four or five people and then occasionally a larger team might show up in the last stages of the game to do Quality Assurance and marketing and things like that but the bulk of the games are still done by teams of less than six people so they may take a long time but in terms of man years or whatever they're they're still fairly a small scale compared to you know an assassin's creed or a typical console title alright that's about it I think I'm getting the piecing sign or something I don't know so yeah if there's any more questions nope okay well thank you [Applause]