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Playable By Everybody: PopCap Branches Out

PopCap's goal, in their own games and the ones they get from others, is to make games "playable by everybody, from my mom to an oil rig welder to traditional videogamers. We can't guarantee that everybody will like every game, but we want to minimize all the hurdles that prevent people from enjoying a title, [like] nasty interfaces, high difficulty curves, unintuitive gameplay and so on." He describes the ideal PopCap game as "timeless or evergreen, like Monopoly or Tetris. It should be just as fun and playable five years from now as it is today."

As for the company itself, they're "doing [their] best to make [their] games as universally available as possible, from the web to PC retail, to cell phones, to Xboxes and so on. So, that's one angle for PopCap, expanding in different formats and channels." When it comes to new games, Bookworm Adventures Deluxe is only the beginning of their dabbling. "We're definitely experimenting with some unusual new genres that aren't usually thought of as 'casual.' At the same time, we're continuing with more traditional puzzle games." He's unwilling to give out hints, saying it's all "very hush-hush right now." But in the next couple of years, "you'll be seeing some really strange things from us." He won't predict their success or failure, he says, "but it should be interesting either way!"

[em]Shannon Drake is a Contributing Editor for The Escapist and changed his name when he became a citizen. It used to be Merkw