Bejeweled Coming to Warcraft. Yes, Really.

Had to rub my eyes when I saw this Onion-esque headline at Wired. "Bejeweled, Warcraft Combine to Form World's Most Addictive Game." No, it's not April Fool's. The puzzle game will be added into WoW next Thursday, allowing players to kill time when they're on long, tedious tasks, like waiting for a raid or gold/item-farming. What's interesting on top of packing one world-class timesuck inside of another (in real world terms, this would be like snorting bacon-flavored meth), is how it all came to pass. Michael Fromwiller, a student at San Jose State, wrote an add-on he called Besharded, which came reasonably close to mimicking PopCap's hit. But it didn't come close enough for PopCap, which instead of sending out a C&D letter, reached out to Fromwiller and hired him to do a version of the real thing. Next week it's available for WoW, with no opposition from Blizzard. Wired has the word straight from PopCap itself, but a no-comment from Blizzard. Bejeweled, Warcraft Combine to Form World's Most Addictive Game [Wired]