Peggle

PopCap studio director Sukhbir Sidhu loved pachinko machines and knew the problem with them: they are mostly luck. When programmer Brian Rothstein built a new 2D engine, Sidhu saw his game in it, and the two of them worked alone for five months. Early versions crossed pachinko with Breakout and kept pachinko's rapid fire and moving targets, which made levels either frantic or exhausting; a still field of pegs, with only a random subset of orange ones required, turned out to be the fun. Development ran two years. For a while the game was about Thor and called Thunderball, and much darker; when the theme lightened the name went too, through Pego and Pogo, the latter blocked because EA already ran a Pogo games portal.

The finished game had 55 levels of roughly a hundred pegs, 25 of them orange, ten balls to clear them, a catcher sliding along the bottom, and ten Peggle Masters whose powers fired from green pegs, from a second ball to a drawn trajectory. The ending was an accident. "Extreme Fever" and the "Ode to Joy" started as placeholders while Sidhu planned the wild sound and light of a pachinko jackpot, but testers loved the placeholders, so the team polished them instead, adding the slow zoom on the last orange peg.

It shipped for Windows on February 27, 2007 and did not sell much. Then PopCap learned the game was a fixture at Valve's offices, and the two companies built Peggle Extreme, ten levels themed on Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2 and Portal, bundled with the Windows release of The Orange Box. Sales took off; Sidhu said it reached people who would "never be caught dead playing a game with unicorns and rainbows." By early 2009 the trial and full versions had been downloaded more than 50 million times. A World of Warcraft add-on let raiders settle loot with a round of Peggle. The Xbox Live Arcade version in March 2009 was the service's top seller for two weeks, and when the iPhone version went on sale for a dollar that June it became the most-purchased app in the App Store. Eurogamer found "a constant series of rewards"; The A.V. Club called it "comfort food for the omnivorous gamer"; MSNBC put it among the five most addictive computer games ever.

Peggle Nights followed in September 2008 and a DS version, Dual Shot, in 2009. PopCap, by then an Electronic Arts subsidiary, announced Peggle 2 at E3 2013 and Peggle Blast for phones a year later.