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The Wired blog has reported that PopCap Games' successful jewel matching puzzle title, Bejeweled, is set to invade the lands of Azeroth when it becomes available within World of Warcraft this Thursday. The add on is the work of Michael Fromwiller, a fan of both games whose early attempts to recreate the puzzle title drew the attention of PopCap. The company hired Fromwiller to create an official version.

Michael Fromwiller, a student at San Jose State University in California, used his love of PopCap's puzzler to combat a typical, if paradoxical, WoW problem: The addictive game is often boring.

Players, Fromwiller says, frequently find themselves staring slack-jawed at the screen, watching the trade channel for hot deals on virtual items or waiting for friends to log in so a raid can begin.

"Thinking about all the add-ons that I used and what they could do, I decided that there was potential [in making] a mini-game to play within World of Warcraft ," Fromwiller says.

"I started with a simple game or two in order to see what type of games I could make. After I was satisfied with the results, I thought to myself: 'Hey! What about Bejeweled ? I could probably make a clone of the original game for WoW and could cure plenty of hours of boredom.'"

Using World of Warcraft's mod tools, Fromwiller built a surprisingly convincing copy of PopCap's game, which he called Besharded . His feat did not go unnoticed by the Seattle-based publisher of the original.

"[ Besharded ] was cool and fun, but not very polished, so we reached out to the gamer in question and hired him to do an official version of Bejeweled for WoW ," PopCap representative Garth Chouteau said in an e-mail to Wired.com.

Wired: Bejeweled, Warcraft Combine

PopCap Games (add to watch list)

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