PopCap Games

[instrumental music] Boink.

Hello, greetings, bonjour, and welcome to yet another episode of the unofficial PopCap Popcast.

I'm Steve Notley.

And I'm Isaac Aubrey.

And, uh, as always, we like to put forward that this is not an official podcast related to EA or PopCap, or PopCap under EA.

We're just the old world of PopCap from the 2000s talking about, uh, telling war stories and talking about our times in the trenches.

Uh, and today we have on, uh, I always say someone very special, uh, but Jason Kapalka here is indeed very special.

He was one of the founders, uh, of PopCap Games.

Hello, bonjour, and welcome to PopPlays, an unofficial PopCap podcast side project.

I'm Steve Notley, former writer-designer of PopCap Games, and I'm just going to sit down and play through some of the games that I've worked on.

Do some chit-chat, some backstory, context, all that fun stuff.

Today we are playing Peggle, the original Peggle.

I would've had to go find it.

We are of course, uh, about to discuss Peggle, um, which is a 2007 casual game from PopCap.

Um, this and Plants versus Zombies are the, the games that kind of made them...

That put them on, you know, the big boys' radar and, uh, [chuckles] got them, got them purchased very likely.

Um, and that's sort of like, okay, how do you make a shooter more broad? How do you whatever, blah, blah, blah, right? Um, but this is...

I just remember when both these games came out, we were playing them at work and excited to play them and obsessed with them, and that really didn't happen very often with, with casual games.

And so, just something about, about PopCap's formula.

Because I mean, they had others, Bejeweled and others, that didn't really do that at, in my, as, at least in my memory.

... that that influence is, is there on themselves in terms of how they designed, uh, and what they sought to do with the player, so.

Yeah, I think pa- I mean, I think that's why I'm, I'm, I know that's why I'm glad we're talking about PopCap because [clears throat] I do think there, there are many studios that, that were helping with this era define what a certain, you know, kind of macro category was, like casual games, but PopCap definitely was one of the big trailblazers, um, even before mobile.

Uh, and, and whether it's a formula for them or not, we don't know the internal development side of it, like if they had some sort of pillars that they would try to apply.

But I think they, you know, they knew what they wanted clearly, 'cause like you said, their games are pretty consistently in this band.

But if it's too easy and not engaging enough, people won't keep playing it.

But like I said, I've played this game three times now, uh, or almost three times, and it's sort of like that is weird to me 'cause I, time is too precious.

[chuckles] Um, and so, uh, so they definitely found some special sauce there, uh, PopCap specifically, and I think that we'll, we'll see that with the next one we play too.

And then the other thing that's, uh, that, that kind of occurred to me all over again playing this P- "PVZ" again is, again, coming back to the RTS lineage, that, you know, if there's a casual gamer out there, I'll use my mom as an example 'cause she's actually a pretty big casual gamer on the iPad- And I've gotten her to play some games like this before, and, you know, this is an RTS.