It also helped that the company made decisions that weren’t exactly… normal. For instance, when they discovered that someone had created a bootlegged version of Bejeweled, using their assets, and then ported it into World Of Warcraft, their response wasn’t lawyers. Their response, Coleman recalls, was “‘How about we just pay you, and you make it good?’ And he did! He came to work for us for a number of years.” Which is how it came to be that WoW featured Bejeweled, and later Peggle, as games to play while on flightpaths.

Advertisement

And this wasn’t a one-off. PopCap was no stranger to controversies over ‘borrowing’ from other games. (On the Zuma/Puzzloop contention Kapalka says, “I can’t deny it, we definitely were inspired by Puzzloop. We thought it was dead, we found it in some MAME archive from 10 years ago, and had no idea it would be missed by anybody if we borrowed some of the mechanics.”) But it went the other way far more often, and their response was almost always to reach out.

Garth Chouteau brought up another extraordinary example. While Bejeweled was ported to almost any device you could think of, one PopCap hadn’t opted for was the original GameBoy. A man called Bernie King decided to make it himself, because his girlfriend was a huge fan. “So he hacked it onto the Game Boy for her and then programmed in a special level to drop a diamond ring from the top and ask her to marry him. When we heard about that story, we thought it was so cool that we helped pay for the wedding. We paid for a Bejeweled cake and Bejeweled-themed decorations for the wedding and reception.”

Advertisement

Or the time they found out someone was producing ceramic Plants Vs Zombies garden decorations, and responded by asking him to make them 900 of them, handing out sets to press for a promotional event.

Advertisement

All this time, PopCap had found its comfort zone. Working hard, for years, to create incredibly approachable games, to sell primarily to a casual gaming audience, via casual gaming portals. And yet despite this, they eventually found their games were being played by the so-called ‘hardcore’ players. Their first realization of this was the day Valve called them up to yell at them about Peggle.

“Before that, it was pretty much moms and grandmas,” says Kapalka. “I think Peggle was the first crossover we had with the hardcore audience.” Their games were being sold on Steam, mostly as an experiment, and had started catching a new audience’s attention.

Advertisement

The call from Valve is remembered by everyone slightly differently. Coleman recalls they said, “We really enjoy Peggle, but we also hate you, because you’ve destroyed productivity for the past 48 hours. No one has done any work, they’re just sitting around challenging each other to get high scores in Peggle.” Chouteau remembers it as their “begging Sukhbir [Sidhu, Peggle’s project lead] to tell them how to beat the last level of Peggle so they could get back to work.” And Vechey says they said, “You’ve single-handedly slipped Left 4 Dead. Everyone’s playing it, there’s an internal competition, and it’s screeched development of Left 4 Dead to a halt.”

In response, PopCap made a goofy version of Peggle featuring Valve icons like headcrabs, and sent it over to them as a gift. Valve replied saying, “Can we put this in the Orange Box?” PopCap said, “What’s that?” This led to PopCap’s creating that special edition of Peggle that appeared in PC versions of the legendary Orange Box, with Half-Life, TF2 and Portal-themed levels. Their journey to the specialist side had begun.

Advertisement
Plants Vs Zombies.
Plants Vs Zombies.
Screenshot: PopCap / Kotaku

But it was 2009’s Plants vs. Zombies that completed the transition. While Bejeweled was still selling vast numbers in every iteration, on every platform, PvZ was PopCap’s biggest, most expensive project to date. And it wasn’t one they were at all sure about. Firstly, it was a far more complicated core idea, taking tower defense and trying to broaden its appeal to the masses. Secondly, you know, zombies. But with their attitude of trying things out to see where they went, they hired project lead George Fan to set up a new studio in San Francisco, and gave him time and funds to prototype it.

Advertisement

“Working on PvZ was really a golden window that I don’t think many people get to experience,” Fan tells me. “The joy of working on it, everyone having such a great time, reflects on the game itself. The situation making PvZ was really a Goldilocks zone. PopCap let us make what we wanted to, and they trusted us to make the best game we could. It was a pretty small core team, everyone on the team got along, and we were extremely productive together. There were so few hiccups.”

The name “Plants vs. Zombies” was originally a placeholder, and it looked like it might stick until a colleague of Fan’s suggested “Lawn Of The Dead.” Instantly everyone knew that’s what they wanted it to be called. So much so that Fan reshaped the entire game to match it. “In the final version you play on your front lawn,” says Fan, “but prior to that it had been set in a back garden dirt patch.” Yes, that’s why it’s a game in which you strangely plant flora in your lawn—for the pun. And then they checked with the lawyers. Because of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, of course.

Advertisement

Inspired by, of all things, a School Of Rock DVD extra in which Jack Black appealed to Led Zepplin to let them use their songs, Fan put together a video of himself dressed as a zombie programmer, growling at the camera. The subtitles read, “George Romero, please let us grace this game with your beautiful name.” They sent it off to Romero’s production company, excited to hear back. Fan continues, “I don’t think they saw it. We just got a form letter back.”

Advertisement

Heartbreak. In the end, despite similarly unlikely suggestions like “Residential Evil”, they went back to Plants vs. Zombies, but not without later getting some sweet revenge.

Seemingly entirely unironically, a few years later Romero’s production company got in touch with PopCap. Fan remembers it with relish. “‘Hey, we have a great idea. Would you like to cross promote PvZ with one of our new movies coming out?’ I didn’t get to write the response, but I heard it was very satisfying to write. Like, ‘Hell no.’”

Advertisement

In fact, the person who did get to write the response was Garth Chouteau. “I was the revenge moment,” he tells me. Disparagingly remembering Romero’s appeal he says, “It was just this sort of overture, ‘Can we somehow leverage your super-hot brand for our horrible fifth follow-up sequel movie?’. [I replied] ‘You know, you shot us down three or four years ago when we begged to be able to use Lawn of the Dead, so I don’t think so. I’ll run it up the chain, but I don’t think so.’ It was very satisfying. I remember circulating that email going, hee hee, who’s the hot property now, boys?”


Plants vs. Zombies didn’t sell at all well in PopCap’s traditional spaces. “But where it did well was on Steam,” says founder Jason Kapalka. “We knew the guys at Valve and got on well, but even having a casual game like PvZ on Steam was a bit of an exception.” And it seems this was the moment where things could have gone in two very different directions for PopCap.

Advertisement

PvZ found an audience on Steam, but it found an even bigger one once it was ported to the burgeoning iPad and iPhone market. And then all of a sudden, Facebook happened.


In every conversation I had speaking to former PopCap employees and founders, a sadness came to their voice when it came to talking about Facebook. The consensus seems to be that this was the first time they tripped up, the first time they didn’t understand a market. “Who’s going to pay money for cows?!” cried Kapalka, a sudden switch from his soothing Canadian drawl when the topic came up. He was referring to FarmVille, of course, the game from rival casual game studio Zynga that defined gaming success on the social network. As a company that had been at the forefront of multiple online gaming trends, not getting a good read of where things were heading on Facebook caused consternation. Some for not recognizing a new market, others because it just wasn’t a direction in which they wanted to take their games. “I kind of wish we’d just ignored the Facebook era,” says co-founder Brian Fiete, real regret in his tone.

Advertisement

It even affected the near-manic enthusiasm of PR man Garth Chouteau. Remembering a new Peggle that was designed for Facebook (“Oh man, that was going to be so fucking cool,”), his voice shifts and he adds, “I don’t know why it didn’t make it to market, but we did not do well on Facebook.”

Advertisement

It was around this time, early 2011, PopCap created an alternative label, Fourth & Battery, to release smaller, more obscure, less family friendly titles. Game jam ideas that weren’t quite hooky enough to become full-fledged projects. Or, as I would suggest, a company getting itchy feet and not really knowing what to do with itself.


From my conversations, it seems morale became a significant problem at PopCap. “The way we were making games was different,” says Fiete. “It became half game design, but half marketing, A/B testing. The whole Facebook movement was pretty damaging. This concept that you make a game, and you can just throw crap in it, then you do an A/B test. And if that crap works you leave it in, and if it doesn’t work you take it out. This is how some of these managers would see game design. This was something we never had to fight before.”

Advertisement

It seemed a sale was inevitable. In fact, they’d come close on a few occasions before, different people’s recollections suggesting between five and 11 times. Coleman, who was not in the upper management, recalls the atmosphere in the months leading up to 2011’s sale to EA. “There was a fair amount of uncertainty in the company at that time. We’d grown a lot. There were like 600 people in a ton of offices. There was a lot of shift in what our focus was going to be. Should it be on PC? Should it be on Facebook? Should it be on iOS? There were a lot of games that didn’t see the light of day at that time. It was probably seven months before EA buying us in 2011 there was a clear idea that something was changing. Something big was going to happen.”

Advertisement

On July 12th, it was announced that EA were buying PopCap for $650 million plus stock options. During my conversations with former PopCap staff, I’ve heard numbers as high as $1.2bn were on the table if further targets were met. No one’s going to say no to that offer. (Although Vechey notes, “I think that someone can make that much money off the labor of others... that that’s an option, is something that’s wrong with our world. Yeah, who can say no to that? But why are we letting people make choices like that? How can we justify that level of wealth creation and the level of inequality and suffering we have in the world?”) Of course, the received opinion is that EA then immediately set about turning PopCap into a microtransaction machine, squeezing their customers for every last cent, until all the magic was wrung dry from the company. But no one I spoke to saw it that way. Because, mostly, they acknowledged PopCap was already heading in that direction on its own.

Fiete is the most blatant about it. “We put ourselves on that trajectory maybe a year and a half before we sold to EA,” he tells me. “The sale to EA was because that trajectory was so successful—at least momentarily—and we had these huge revenue projections. Some companies like EA were willing to pay money based on those Facebook revenue projections, and it was just too good to say no to.”

Advertisement

“We weren’t sure it was the right thing to do,” says co-founder Kapalka, “but there was a sense that we’d doubled down on the roulette table quite a few times, and weren’t sure if we’d keep getting lucky in the future.” He later adds, “There was always a battle at PopCap, once all those microtransactions became very common, initially on Facebook games, and then mobile. There was a lot of internal dissent about that.”

After the sale, all the people I spoke to gradually moved on. Some stayed for months, some a couple of years, but all found it just wasn’t a place they wanted to be anymore. Anthony Coleman put it neatly. “We were less and less interested in making what we were told we had to make at that point, which was mobile free-to-play. Then there were more restrictions, because it needed to be the biggest audience possible. And we had other ideas for games we wanted to try, and we knew we’d never be able to make them here. It was time to just move on.”

Advertisement

What alternate timeline could there have been for PopCap, had the sale not happened? While many acknowledged it was very possible the company would be in a similar place, working on free-to-play mobile games simply because that’s where the casual market is now, there were also wistful thoughts about never having backed down from that $20 downloadable format.

Fiete is the most optimistic. “I [wish we’d] kept making downloadable games that went on sites like Steam. That would have been a different route for PopCap, and we probably wouldn’t have ended up with as much money, but I think we’d still be making those PvZ type games right now probably.”

Advertisement

Kapalka is more hesitant. “It’s hard to say. Maybe we’d have done well and be a huge company now, or it’s possible we’d have crashed and burned.” While Coleman offers a left-field observation. “We almost bought Runic right after they released Torchlight. We had a studio get-together. It in the end fell through. I think if we’d acquired Runic the trajectory for PopCap could have been very different.”

And it’s worth noting that John Vechey, perhaps the most open about his regrets, remains enormously proud of the PopCap that does exist. “I went down to the new PopCap offices last year. I’d prepared some words, but I wasn’t ready for the emotionally overwhelming experience of entering this office. It was not PopCap, but it was not not PopCap. It was also EA but not EA. There were people there who, when we hired them, were super-new to their careers, and were now leading these things. They wouldn’t have been able to do that if PopCap had stayed PopCap. They were pushing on what made a PopCap game a PopCap game. And I was really proud of that. It still had the DNA and legacy of things we had done. That was really neat.”

Advertisement
Peggle Extreme.
Peggle Extreme.
Screenshot: PopCap and Valve / Kotaku

Despite the despondency about how things came to an end, everyone recalled those days in the 2000s with incredible fondness. This close team, working in an open fashion, where any idea was allowed time and cash to see if it could fly. “I feel like I got my education in game design there,” says Anthony Coleman. “This is how you pay attention to details and critically think about how people are going to interact with parts of the game.”

Advertisement

“The three and a half years on PvZ I will cherish forever,” George Fan says, real brightness in his voice (he’s a man the designer Edmund McMillen once described as “very E for Everyone”). “That’s as smooth and as great as making a game is going to get.”

“My favorite time was when I knew everyone, I knew everything that was going on,” suggests Brian Fiete. “Board meetings were very boring because I already knew everything that was going to be discussed. 2004, maybe 2005—that was the sweet spot.”

Advertisement

“We probably built a business around creativity better than many have been able to,” says John Vechey. “We were never purists, but nor were we just trying to make a buck. We had these consultants come in, and we paid them too much money—at the time it seemed an incredible waste of money, in retrospect it was a drop in the bucket—and they came in and said, ‘What’s your vision statement for PopCap?’ Jason says, ‘Make great games?’ They’re like, ‘THAT CAN’T BE ONE!’ But in retrospect that’s exactly what it was.”

Note: We approached the elusive Sukhbir Sidhu for this article, the creative force behind Peggle, but unfortunately got no reply.

Advertisement

John Walker has been writing about video games for over 20 years, and was one of the founders of Rock Paper Shotgun. He’s currently running buried-treasure.org, highlighting excellent indie games that don’t get covered elsewhere.