John Vechey

JOHN VECHEY

John Vechey, is a co-founder of PopCap games. It was founded in 2000 by John Vechey, Brian Fiete, and Jason Kapalka, who learned their trade working for Internet game companies like Flipside and pogo.com. biz catches up with the company’s co-founder, John Vechey. We discuss his views on the evolution of the casual games space, what lies in store for emerging formats like iPhone, and why big businesses entering the space might not have anticipated how hard it is to make great standard-bearing casual games like those PopCap makes.

PopCap’s flagship title Bejeweled has sold more than 50 million units. They wanted to create games, firstly by learning from other Internet gaming sites. Their first game was Bejeweled, a huge-hit gem-swapping game, which was supported on all major platforms and awarded by Computer Gaming World Hall Of Fame in 2002.

Beginning on August 30, 2006, 17 of PopCap’s products became available via Steam. In keeping with PopCap tradition, each PopCap game offered via Steam is available for a free trial period as well as for purchase.

PopCap began another round of expansion in July 2007 by buying other casual game developers including the creators of an online consumer portal, SpinTop Game.

According to the official company website, PopCap Games has won at least 25 industry awards, including Computer Gaming World Hall of Fame status for Bejeweled.

The PopCap framework powers casual games such as Popcap’s own Bejeweled and Sandlot Games’ Cake Mania. The framework only officially runs on the Windows platform, although some games have been ported to the Mac using proprietary conversions of the framework. A community-supported effort is under way for porting the framework to Linux as well.

The Game Developers Choice Awards are annually presented by the Game Developers Conference for outstanding game developers and games. Introduced in 2001, the Game Developers Choice Awards were preceded by the Spotlight Awards, which were presented from 1997 to 1999. This year’s award presentation was held March 25, 2009, at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California, USA. In 2007, gamasutra.com took over management of the awards from the IGDA.