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In a recent interview with Jason Kapalka and James Gwertzman of PopCap Games, Gamecloud examined the company's past, present, and future. Perhaps best known for Bejeweled, PopCap has brought a variety of entertaining puzzle oriented games to computer users.

Gamecloud - By far the company's most popular game is Bejeweled and its sequel. What is it about this particualar game that has attracted so much sales and fan apprciation?

Kapalka and Gwertzman - I wish we could say we had a magic formula for determining what makes a game like Bejeweled such a huge success, but we don’t. What we do know, however, is when we here at PopCap have a great time playing one of our own game and ultimately that’s what we shoot for. We don’t release a game that we develop ourselves until nearly everyone here has played it and thinks it’s ready to put the PopCap name on. As a result, sometimes it takes quite a long time for a given game to ship and we often shelve games that are otherwise looking quite polished just because they’re not fun enough.

Some things we can say about Bejeweled, however, is that it is extremely simple to learn how to play, it’s very polished and attractive, and the core mechanic is deeply satisfying in a fundamental way. Those are important attributes that we try to build into all of our games.

Gamecloud: PopCap Interview

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