Like most men, Chris Sheriff had high hopes for the woman he would one day marry. She ought to be pretty, she ought to be kind, and most crucially she ought to be really, really good at videogames.
This wouldn’t be much of a story if that lede wasn’t a segue into something thematically related, so I’ll let PopCap explain.
“Wait, why is PopCap relating a story about Chris’ marriage?” you ask. Well, if you would keep quiet for a second, I’ll tell you.
See, Chris, like many of you, is a pretty hardcore gamer. He’s into all the usual suspects. Call of Duty, Unreal Tournament, Bejeweled; you know the drill. Y’know what, I’m getting ahead of myself. Back to PopCap explaining things:
The millions of Bejeweled Blitz players on Facebook get a lot out of the game, things like sixty second bursts of challenging excitement, mental stimulation, and fun with friends. But Laura Sheriff of Lexington Park, MD is probably the only one that used her prowess at the game to inspire a marriage proposal.
As the cheerful 26-year old explains it, “My husband, Chris, is a little bit of a video game nerd and he’d always said that the girl who managed to beat him at video games is the girl he would one day marry.” Beating Chris was no mean feat though. “Chris is really into hardcore games like Call of Duty and Unreal Tournament so he’s an experienced gamer. He almost always manages to beat me at Bejeweled Blitz but that one week, I was on fire.” Laura grins and continues, “I racked up a score of over 600,000 which is a lot for me-my highest score ever is 775,000. Our computers are set up in the same room so we can actually sit side-by-side and compete head to head, not just online. I hit that score early in the week and then I watched as Chris tried and tried right up until the last minute to beat me. But he just couldn’t top my score. The next day, he surprised me with a proposal, saying that he knew I was the one for him after I trounced him at Bejeweled Blitz.” Eight months later they were married.
Cute, no? PopCap thought so, and being a company built on equal parts hyper-addictive casual gaming and being really rad human beings, the developer wanted to do something nice for the couple. Thus, in celebration of the duo’s one-year anniversary, PopCap gave them a stupid-huge faux diamond.
See the pictures in the gallery below? That’s the rock. What it lacks in genuine, De Beers-brand karats, it more than makes up for in size (and an almost guaranteed lack of horrific African bloodshed).
So, once again, propers to PopCap for being the kind of gaming company whose generosity and affection for its fanbase generates happy, smiling coverage on websites that otherwise only concern themselves with all the terrible things that go on in the gaming biz. Like us.
More crucially though, propers to Chris and Laura Sheriff for their cute-as-a-button love story. It certainly beats a drunken proposal next to the craps table at Caesar’s Palace.
