Bejeweled
Swap two gems, line up three, watch them vanish and the rest cascade down. PopCap's match-three puzzle turned a simple web game into one of the most-copied ideas in casual gaming.
Bejeweled began in 2000 as a browser game called Diamond Mine, made by the small studio PopCap Games and itself inspired by an earlier web game, Colors. The idea was as clean as it was addictive: swap two adjacent gems to line up three or more of a kind, the matched gems disappear, and the ones above tumble down to fill the gaps — often triggering a chain of new matches.
PopCap tried to sell the game to Microsoft for $50,000 and was turned down; instead Microsoft leased it for $1,500 a month to run on its MSN Games portal and asked the studio to rename it Bejeweled. Within a month it was the number-one game by traffic on MSN Games. A downloadable retail version, Bejeweled Deluxe, followed on May 30, 2001, and the game spread onto seemingly every device that could run it — Palm, Windows, Mac, Xbox, early iPods, and a long list of phones.
The numbers kept climbing: over 10 million copies of Bejeweled Deluxe sold and more than 150 million downloads by 2008. Just as important, it made match-three a genre — the blueprint countless puzzle games (and eventually mobile giants) would build on.
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