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Vechey: He did! My arguments worked! It was like, "What do you want to do after you graduate college?" and he said "make games and work for a games company like you guys." We're like, "All right, so you can spend two years to do the thing that you can do right now, it's your choice." That guy now works for us.ĭavid Roberts: John was trying to get him to come work for us before he finished college. Vechey: Someone did a Bejeweled-type game in WoW that was also kind of neat, but then it was kind of crappy in all these ways, so we said, "Hey this is pretty cool, want to make it Bejeweled?" and it turned into the same sort of deal. We were like, "this kind of sucks, but it's kind of half-way there, and they used their own operating stuff." So we contacted this guy in Poland, and were like, "Hey, we'll give you some money to fix it up a little bit and respond to our feedback, and we'll buy it from you," and he said, "That would be awesome!" So that's how that happened.ĭidn't you do something similar for one that could be played within World of Warcraft? They didn't actually call it Bejeweled, but it was basically Bejeweled. John Vechey: Someone had actually made it. Was that more of just a tech demo? What's the backstory on that? Q: When the iPhone first came out, you guys had one of the first Web apps. Here's an edited transcript of our interview. PopCap CEO David Roberts and co-founder John Vechey stopped by the CNET offices last week to talk about these two titles, as well as a few other topics, like digital-rights management, 3D gaming, and competing social games like Zynga's Farmville. All this for a game that only lasts a minute. According to the company, the 11 million or so monthly active users average a staggering 43 minutes per session. Zombies, which was recently ported over to the iPad and now sits in the top 10 grossing apps on the platform.īut what might be more impressive than that is the continued growth of the company's now 10-year-old title Bejeweled, an iteration of which is available as an application within Facebook. The Seattle-based developer and publisher has found success in its latest title-Plants vs.