Underwater levels in platformers, token diving sections in open-world games—they're usually not great. Swimming controls usually fill us with dread because they don't get the same care or finesse as everything that surrounds them. If we're going to get wet, it's better when games dedicate themselves entirely to representing the experience of being underwater. That's what these games do. 

They're not first-person shooters set at the bottom of the sea or games about fish who are also secret agents. The best underwater games draw inspiration from the life cycles of marine creatures, from what it's like to move through water, from all the dangers and wonders of the ocean. And fish tanks.

Flow

The bit in Spore where you're a single-celled creature working up the food chain was essentially an interactive screensaver, but still one of its best parts. Flow is basically that on its own. You're a microscopic wormy creature gobbling up plankton-like blobs: eat a blue one and travel to an ocean plane one shade lighter, eat a red one and travel to a deeper blue. Creatures one level over are always visible and as you shift, the outline of a ray three times your size might suddenly stop being a blur and become an orange threat ready to eat you.

Then Flow stops being a peaceful interactive screensaver, abruptly becoming a game about the circle of life.

 Insaniquarium

Drop a pellet and one of your guppies either eats it and grows, or doesn't and turns belly-up. At the basic level Insaniquarium is just about owning fish: decorative wet idiots who can't be trusted not to starve. Then you get a snail who helps you collect the coins your fish drop, and a swordfish who helps you fight off alien invaders who teleport inside your tank and will eat your fish unless you laser that alien to death. Insaniquarium takes the inane pleasantness of owning a fish tank and video gamifies the hell out of it.

Silent Hunter 3

As far as submarine simulators go, Silent Hunter 3, especially with mods, is as in-depth as they get. This is the game where people go for the full U-boat fantasy, playing without time compression so missions take literal days and they have to alter their sleeping patterns around it. If you yearn to fiddle with dials that let you adjust speeds down to the individual knot, then Silent Hunter 3 is for you.

Grab some graphics mods to spruce up the 2005-era looks and dive into the simmiest sub sim that's ever simmed.

Sub Commander

If Silent Hunter III is for pretending you're in Das Boot, Sub Commander is The Hunt For Red October. But where the Silent Hunter series are all studio projects, Sub Commander is the creation of one indie designer and closer to FTL. Your nuclear sub will catch fire at some point, spring leaks, suddenly become radioactive. As much as any patrol or encounter, your mission is to keep the sub running, equipping crew and assigning them to emergency repairs and hoping they don't asphyxiate because you'll need them for the next inevitable emergency. May they all see Montana, one day.

Song of the Deep

In Song of the Deep the ocean is a kids' book where hermit crabs have shops in their shells, a baby leviathan wants to be friends, and you pilot a homemade yellow submarine. It's not just for children, though. It's also a 2D metroidvania in the vein of Aquaria—undersea passages are blocked by water currents, or boulders, or a chubby pufferfish, and there are upgrades to defeat each obstacle. This is the sea from fairytales, everything better down where it's wetter, best played by parent and child together to enjoy the pretty backdrops and help each other past the harder puzzles and bosses.

Subnautica

Subnautica is about taming the ocean—an alien ocean admittedly—and learning how it can help you. You need synthetic rubber to make a pair of fins, so you find the vines whose seed clusters you need to craft rubber; you need more water so you grab a bladderfish as it swims past. Later Subnautica goes beyond basic stuff and you start constructing habitats, a network of breathing tubes, your own computers. You tame the sea and make a home that's also a farm and an aquarium, an octopus's garden of your own.

Abzu

There will be at least one moment in Abzu where your heart floats right out your chest and into your mouth. Maybe it'll be when you race alongside orcas, or a whale passes so close it eclipses everything. Abzu is about diving, and half of diving is looking at the life aquatic and going “woah”. The other half is movement, and Abzu does that well too. Your sleek diver never needs to breathe, you're free to tumble, turn, and follow interesting fish or race along with a current. Each undersea area is scattered with secrets, a simple puzzle to open the next area, and a hint of story delivered without words. Most importantly each environment, whether coral reef or deep trench, has an abundance of living things to swim with while the orchestral soundtrack does its thing and pushes your heart straight up.

The Aquatic Adventure of the Last Human

In the opening minutes of The Aquatic Adventure of the Last Human, you pilot a small submarine through the oceans beneath a frozen post-human world, and eviscerate a giant sea worm by swimming into its maw and out the ass. From there, Aquatic Adventure stacks up one quiet set piece after another on a tour through a thriving underwater ecosystem grown over the ruins of civilization. And as the last person alive, your only goal is simply to live, which isn’t always easy with massive, mutated sea creatures on your tail. As you explore, you’ll uncover the story of what led to the cataclysmic weather events that killed everyone but you, and find ship upgrades to become more efficient at murdering innocent marine life on your quest to outlive them, you monster. Accompanied by a catchy, somber soundtrack, The Aquatic Adventure of the Last Human is a tragic twist on the action exploration formula, placing empowerment and progress behind reckless fish murder and ecological destruction. 

Not a screenshot of Peggle 2—but close. It's Peggle.

EA really dropped the ball at its E3 press conference earlier today—it announced Peggle 2, that is. The sequel to PopCap's pachinko-like hit is coming on later this year to , and those are the hard facts. Alright, we don't even have a screenshot, but we do have extreme fever dreams of what we hope Peggle 2 is all about.

We expect, at the very least, an all-new cast of characters with new special abilities and 60-some new levels. That's a given. I'd also love to see more pinball-inspired elements in the levels—there are already a few in the more advanced Peggle: Nights stages. Other bouncing ball related game modes would be welcome too, perhaps with more physics elements. Battlefield 4 isn't the only game that can have destructible terrain. And if not all that, an official level editor would be ace.

Going further, a deeper adventure mode, perhaps with RPG like progression, skills that level up, usable items, and...am I ruining Peggle right now? Maybe a little. Simplicity is part of what makes it great, but as long as the standard just-hit-pegs-with-balls game is there, I don't see why it couldn't safely test a grander scale. I'd be cool with a world map.

There's also the possibility of multiplayer—it doesn't mesh with my "I'm going to play Peggle now so please go away, everyone in the world, this is 'me' time and don't care what you think" attitude toward the game, but a co-op mode could work. One player aims the ball, while the other controls a secondary function like pinball paddles? Either that, or head-to-head competition, but that seems even more in conflict with the spirit of Peggle.

In the end, all I really want is the rush of power sliding the ball down a slope of pegs and into the 100,000 point bonus slot—a joy I scoffed at before finally trying it for myself. Peggle already offers that, but I trust PopCap can find a way to keep it exciting. Let us know in the comments how you'd expand on the Peggle formula, and for the latest from E3, check out our complete coverage.

Last weekend we ran a competition to send in a replay of your best shot in a Peggle game, with a large bounty of Peggle swag for our favourite. We've watched all the shots, recorded our favourites and made them into a quick highlights video. Overall winner after the clip.



If you watch the rabbit during the Sir Jelliot's endless lobster flippery, you can almost see him going slowly mad trying to hold his cheerful disposition.

And the prize for coolest Peggle shot goes to:
 
Klinglern! For his ridiculous rebound in Peggle Extreme. He completes the level in the first second of the shot, but then his ball bounces back out of the lowest scoring bucket, up through a portal, teleports to the top left of the map, drops down onto a purple score peg (which count for 10,000 druing Extreme Fever), then rebounds off a bumper to hit the last peg on the board, triggering ULTRA EXTREME FEVER and turing all the score buckets into 100,000 pointers - into which it finally falls. The stuff of legend.

Klinglern wins this lovely spread of peg-related treats:



Thanks again to all who entered.

If you've never wanted a tiny plushie Splork of your own, you haven't got that far in Peggle yet. Well, now you can get one of those, a Peggle mug, two Peggle badges, a Peggle mouse mat, a Peggle iPhone skin, Peggle, Peggle Nights, £30 of iTunes vouchers to buy Peggle and anything else on the iPhone, a bumper sticker reading XTRM FVR, and for some reason a bunch of Chuzzles.

All you have to do is save a replay of a great Peggle shot, zip it up, and post it on our forums. It can be Peggle Deluxe, Peggle Nights, or Peggle Extreme, but it probably has to be the PC version. We're not looking for the highest score, just that mix of style, skill and dumb luck that makes Peggle fun. Here's how to submit one.



When you make a good shot, click 'Instant Replay' in the bottom right shortly after.

You'll then get the option to save it as a file. Once you have, find your saved replays in C:\ProgramData\Steam\PeggleExtreme\userdata\replays

Search for 'replays' if you don't have that folder.

Then right click the one you want, and go to Send to > Compressed folder.

This will create a zip with your replay in, and you can upload that when you reply to this thread on our forums.

Deadline: Any replays posted in that thread before 9AM GMT on Monday the 8th of November are eligible.

Good luck!

PopCap Games are the creators of Bejeweled, Peggle and Plants vs. Zombies, each of them one of the biggest and most lovable games on PC. When casual and social games are reaching ever larger audiences and their developers are getting a bad reputation for poor design practices, how have PopCap managed to find fans amongst gamers and grannies alike? To find out, I visited the studio and interviewed everyone I could find. We're running those interviews each day this week and calling it PopCap Week.

Today I'm speaking to PopCap co-founder Jason Kapalka and the designer of Peggle, Sukhbir Sidhub. It's only now when looking back at the transcript that I realise there are long periods when I don't ask any questions. Jason and Sukhbir have worked together for years, and it shows. They talk away without my intervention, revealing details of PopCap's forgotten first release, a strip poker game called Foxy Poker, and follow it up by going into detail about the many variants of Peggle, including a Thor-themed version called Thunderball, and what would have happened if co-founder John Vechey's mum had been PopCap's accountant.



Jason Kapalka: You know the original name, right?

PC Gamer: I think it was Sexy Action Cool?

Jason Kapalka: Yeah. I don't know if you know the original product. Did they show you Foxy Poker?

PC Gamer: No.

Jason Kapalka: That's the PR person having a pained look on their face

(laughter)

Jason Kapalka: This is not in our corporate histories, but the first thing that we did was a strip poker game. Mostly just because we thought, “We can do this thing, then we can sell it and take the money to use to do whatever.”

It was more like strip video poker and in fact there wasn't actually any stripping. We were still trying to do this advertising stuff where they wouldn't allow nudity, so there was this awesome power stripping where there was always some object interposed. We did get a lot of complaints, because you had to play a long time to get enough tokens to get to the final stage of undress, and when you did there was some vases and things, so we got a lot of complaints that they'd just spent four hours.

It was a pretty good strip poker game if I do say so myself, but we found there was going to be a hard time doing anything with it because we didn't really have the heart to deal with any of the porn companies because they were just too scummy. We abandoned our short lived effort to be a company like that. We then did Bejeweled and after that, yeah, started licensing games to Microsoft, primarily, and a few other companies.

PC Gamer: Did you have in your heads the type of game that you wanted to make at that point?

Jason Kapalka: The strip poker game seemed like a way to get some starting money, but the kind of games we were planning on doing were always these web-based, simple puzzle games.

We ended up gravitating more to single player puzzle games, not necessarily because of choice, but because it was easier to sell, because the multiplayer stuff was a real pain in the butt to integrate. If you want to go to Microsoft with a multiplayer game it was really hard, because you had to work with their APIs.

We did actually do multiplayer games for the first couple of years at PopCap. Psychobabble is the coolest one, probably. A sort of competitive fridge magnet poetry. It was really fun and actually very funny, it was a laugh out loud hilarious often. We eventually took it down a few years back, not because it wasn't any good but because it was literally impossible to make it family friendly. No matter how many curse words or suggestive words you took out, people would find a way to make something filthy out of any possible configuration of words.

Sukhbir Sidhub: That was definitely half the fun of the game.



PC Gamer: At what point did you join the company?

Sukhbir Sidhub: I think it was June 2002. It was about a year or two after Bejeweled.

Jason Kapalka: Yeah, 2002, I guess. At that point I can't remember what employee number you were.

Sukhbir Sidhub: I think there were like seven other people, but I'm not quite sure. Pretty small office.

PC Gamer: I read your bio and you were number 8 I think.

Jason Kapalka: Sounds right. I mean, some of them were like John's mum was our accountant.

Sukhbir Sidhub: His aunt.

Jason Kapalka: Oh no, his Aunt. Sorry, that would be terrible!

Sukhbir Sidhub: (laughs) Yeah. I don't think we would be here now if John's mom was our accountant back then.

Jason Kapalka: Yeah, I think we'd all be in jail.

PC Gamer: Can you talk me through a little bit the development process for making Peggle?

Sukhbir Sidhub: The first conversation I had with Jason when I talked about coming up here to work for PopCap, we talked about the kinds of games they wanted to make. You know, casual games, games for a wide audience. I actually mentioned Pachinko at that time and we started talking about it just in that one conversation.

That was years before we even started Peggle, because I'd actually played a Pachinko game that Jason had at his apartment back in San Francisco. It was a Godzilla Pachinko machine, and it was awesome. It was really fun and it was mesmerising and I couldn't believe how fun it was and how addictive it was.

So that experience always stayed with me, but the problem with that was, it was all luck. It's hard to make a computer game, because the fun in Pachinko, in regular Pachinko, is the gambling aspect of it. Even though it's mesmerising, it's going to be hard to get that same feeling in a game. That was a problem

And then a few years later, one of our developers had been working on a simple 2D physics engine, and we started talking about the idea of a Pachinko or a pinball game, but we didn't really know what to do. We wanted to do some sort of Pachinko game and we needed some skills, so we were thinking maybe if it was somehow meshed with pinball.

We ended up spending about 3 or 4 months prototyping different game ideas. Some where very Pachinko like, some were very pinball like, some were in between, some were Breakout. We were trying to find something that was fun, accessible, simple, so we went all over the map for a few months.

PC Gamer: So over that three or four months, when did you start to know that you were hitting the right balance between Pachinko and pinball or, what was the breakthrough?



Sukhbir Sidhub: The prototypes I did were more luck based and random. The prototypes Brian did were more skill based, and there were good things and bad things about both.

We got to a point where it was really fun, but it was overly twitchy. It needed fast reflexes and we sort of said, this is fun, this could be a game, but we didn't know how accessible it was going to be.

We stepped back and simplified it and had some spinning crosses instead of pegs. We tried that and it was kind of fun, but we found that with spinning crosses it was impossible to really anticipate where the ball was going to bounce, it was just too random.

Then we changed it to pegs, and basically it was a game where you clear all the pegs. It was kind of fun, but it always had that problem where getting the last peg was super frustrating.

That's when we decided, well, what if it was just 25 pegs you had to hit? I wonder if that would be fun? After that one prototype when we had the 25 pegs, that was it pretty much. We were like, “You know, this is kinda fun.” We spent a few days on that, had a few people play it and felt like … that felt like it.



Jason Kapalka: Then there was a year or two of graphics and themes and names and all that stuff. There's about 300 Peggle variants.

Sukhbir Sidhub: Yeah, so many different ones. Even that prototype had some early themes of Peggle, the classical music and a unicorn in it, so even back then we had some ideas that ended up in the final version.

Jason Kapalka: A lot of those were placeholder, or at leas we thought it was. The Ode to Joy and the unicorn and the rainbow. They were all placeholder stuff that we sort of assumed would be changed, and at one point wasn't Thor supposed to be the star of Peggle?

Sukhbir Sidhub: There was one point, yeah. We were playing around with themes. Jason's very big on themes. At the time, I didn't disagree with that, but I didn't know what theme to put on this game. We'd just spent all this time trying to figure out what the mechanic would be.

Jason Kapalka: It was going to be Thor, and it was going to be called Thunderball.

Sukhbir Sidhub: Yeah, we tried that out and it just didn't work very well. It was a little forced and the art – it just wasn't coming together. And the artist wasn't really thrilled with that theme either. It didn't really play to his strength.

Jason Kapalka: 50 levels of frost giants.

Sukhbir Sidhub: Exactly, yeah. So we ended up backing off and doing something more whimsical and fun. That's was something I was more into. It really fit in with Walter Wilson, the artist, his style.



Jason Kapalka: As far as the theme went, it became its own theme. Sort of random.

Sukhbir Sidhub: Held together by randomness, pretty much.

Jason Kapalka: I don't know what the world of Peggle represents, but it didn't really need one.

Sukhbir Sidhub: At a certain point we had to make a decision about Ode to Joy and what Extreme Fever was. I'd thrown in, “Let's call it fever when you hit the final peg”, and I think Jason said “Let's call it Extreme Fever!”. And that sounds cool, so we called it Extreme Fever, and that's based on Pachinko games. At certain points in some Pachinko games you get the ball in a certain slot and it goes “Fever! Fever! Fever!” At that point it was completely random and we were like, “Should we really go with this because no-one's going to understand it?” and we decided to do that, and that's the point that we decided to...

Jason Kapalka: Embrace the randomness. Keep that unicorn in.

Sukhbir Sidhub: Yeah, keep basically all the crazy aspects of it, and try to make Extreme Fever as dramatic as possible. Because without it, it's a fun game, it's enjoyable but …

Jason Kapalka: If you're looking for a turning point, the point where we decided that the unicorn and the rainbow were not placeholder was the moment where we more comfortable with embracing humour in a game. Doing something that we think is funny, even if we weren't sure anyone would get the joke. Peggle has been embraced by hardcore players a bit, but, it wasn't really clear at the time that that would happen.

Sukhbir Sidhub: It took a little while, but really the Half Life 2 Peggle Extreme edition really helped change people's minds about Peggle.



Jason Kapalka: I remember we were quite worried when we did the Half Life thing, because nobody really knew how these Half Life Orange Box buyers were going to respond to this Peggle thing. It was strange because of some of the comments we'd gotten afterwards. I clearly remember one guy had written, “This is the gayest game I have ever seen, yet I cannot stop playing it”.

Sukhbir Sidhub: The difference was, before Peggle Extreme came out, people were saying, “This is the gayest game we've ever seen,”, but they weren't saying “but this is awesome.” Afterwards they were saying, “This is the gayest game I've ever seen … but it's awesome!

Jason Kapalka: Somehow the association with Half Life gave hardcore gamers permission to say, “Oh, it's affiliated with Half Life, it's got to be cool, it's not gay!”

Jason Kapalka: That kind of paved the way for Plants vs Zombies as well, the idea that we could get away with something a little more surreal or silly, and kind of trust that people would get the joke. If you look at Peggle the wrong way, it looks like something that's been designed by a gang of idiots for their idea of a five year old. But it's not really pandering to five year olds. It's really just going for this surreal, zany look intentionally. We had to trust that people would get that.

PC Gamer: What was the Thor theme like?

Sukhbir Sidhub: I might have some pictures of it. It was pretty crap. We only did some explorations of it.

Jason Kapalka: It was very dark. Dark and dingy.

Sukhbir Sidhub: Yeah, it was dark and dingy with a lot of browns and dark colours.



Jason Kapalka: I think it was that Thor and his pet goat were travelling across Asgard or something, and the hammer was the shooter, or something like that?

Sukhbir Sidhub: Yeah. I really liked the name Thunderball for it, even before we had a theme, I thought it'd be kind of cool. Ultimately, we kept that name for a good chunk of the development, and at a certain point we said, “This doesn't feel like a game that's called Thunderball at all”. It was really tough. Then we picked Pego, P-E-G-O, and we were really happy with it, and it grew.

Jason Kapalka: And then, Pogo!

Sukhbir Sidhub: And then right at the end, a few weeks before we were going gold we hear that we can't use Pego because Pogo might complain. I think they did complain.

Jason Kapalka: I don't think they complained. We ran it past the trademark guys and the trademark guys said it could be a problem. Then, ironically, we rang Pogo up and asked if they would mind if we used it, and they said “We might”.

Sukhbir Sidhub: So then we had to change the name and that was really tough. In retrospect sounds like a great name, but at the time it was like “Peggle!? Ugh! That doesn't sound like Pego!”

Jason Kapalka: That's happened to a lot of games.

Sukhbir Sidhub: Pego sounds weird now.



Jason Kapalka: Plants vs. Zombies also had, I don't know if you heard this story on the name for that.

Sukhbir Sidhub: Oh boy.

Jason Kapalka: It started off called Plants vs Zombies.

Sukhbir Sidhub: It was a placeholder name. It felt like a placeholder name for everyone.

Jason Kapalka: Then its name changed. I can't remember who suggested it, but the name changed to Lawn of the Dead. And it was an awesome name. At some point though, someone decided to run it past the lawyers.

Sukhbir Sidhub: It always goes wrong when you run it by lawyers.

Jason Kapalka: I will say this for our lawyers in this case, the lawyers said, “You know, you're going to have trouble with the movie company that owns rights to Dawn of the Dead”, and we said, “But wait, it's a parody!” and they said “Yeah, maybe, but it's also commercial and making money and so you can have that argument, but you might be having that argument in court.” It would have sucked to have to go to court for it.

Sukhbir Sidhub: Everyone was really upset about that whole notion, so.

Jason Kapalka: George Fan even put together a video message of himself in zombie makeup to George Romero, begging him.

Sukhbir Sidhub: It's like, if the lawyers don't agree then maybe we can get George Romero to stand up.

Jason Kapalka: To intercede or something like that, because we thought, he let them do Shaun of the Dead, he's a cool guy. He wasn't cool about it.

Sukhbir Sidhub: We found some sort of agent there who knew Romero's agent, and passed it on through this chain of people who knew George Romero. And George Fan did this video, and it took him a long time to get it together, we spent a lot of time making this little video plea to George Romero and packaged it up, sent it, and we basically just heard back, “Not interested.” That was crushing.

Jason Kapalka: Though there was a point of justice, because just recently this year we heard from some publicity company that was representing George Romero's new zombie film Survival of the Dead, and they wanted to see if we could do some sort of cross promotion with that. At that point we had the pleasure of being able to say, “We think your brand might pollute our game, we're not interested”

Sukhbir Sidhub: I don't even know if George Romero ever actually saw it. The agent might have just seen it and said...

Jason Kapalka: It's entirely possible he didn't have anything to do with it.

We're giving away 10,000 copies of Bejeweled 2 this evening. If you're hoping to get one, please go to your User Control Panel and make sure you're signed up to receive our newsletter. If that box isn't checked when we send them out, we're not allowed to e-mail you stuff like this, so you won't receive one. If you're not signed up to our community at all, of course, do that first - you're not too late. If you don't get an e-mail bang on 5pm GMT, don't fret, it takes a while send out this many e-mails.

It's PopCap week here on PCGamer.com, kicking off with the first juicy details of Bejeweled 3. And as a special gift to those signed up to our site, we're giving away 10,000 copies of Bejeweled 2 - usually £14.99. All you have to do is be a registered member of our site at around 5pm tomorrow evening GMT (1pm EDT), and be signed up to receive our newsletter. If you've already signed up but aren't sure if you checked that box, you can find out and change your preference at your user control panel. Otherwise, sign up now - it's free.

You'll get an e-mail to the address you signed up with, containing your code and a link for where to use it. You won't need credit card details, just a name and e-mail address. The giveaway will work on a first come, first served basis, so once 10,000 people have snagged their copies, the offer will expire. Right now there's plenty for everyone, but we can't guarantee whether there will be by tomorrow.

PopCap Games are the creators of Bejeweled, Peggle and Plants vs. Zombies, each of them one of the biggest and most lovable games on PC. When casual and social games are reaching ever larger audiences and their developers are getting a bad reputation for poor design practices, how have PopCap managed to find fans amongst gamers and grannies alike? To find out, I visited the studio and interviewed everyone I could find. We're running those interviews each day this week and calling it PopCap Week.

We begin with John Vechey. As one of PopCap's three co-founders, he's been with the company since the beginning and instrumental in growing the studio from three friends working from home, to a massive operation with hundreds of people. He also played a key role in developing the studios biggest game, Bejeweled. I spoke to him about when PopCap was originally named Sexy Action Cool, what he thinks Activision and EA are screwing up, and about where the idea for Bejeweled came from.

PC Gamer: To start at the beginning, how did you get into game development?

John Vechey: Well Brian Fiete and I, one of the co-founders, met in college. So I never had a computer growing up and I remember my friend had got a computer. I went over to his house and it was AOL, the internet. I was like “holy cow”, I had no idea what it was, and my first thought was, “Man, I want to play games”, and this was a time of Tempest, not Tempest. What was that game where you could rotate in any direction? It was like a first person shooter but you had no – it might have been set in space or underwater.

PC Gamer: Was it Descent?

John Vechey: Descent! Yeah, Descent. I was like, “Woah, I want to play against people!” and he said, “It's much harder than you think,” and so then I personally thought “that's a bummer” because what's the point in connecting things unless you can play games? But other than that I had an Atari and Nintendo growing up, I never had a computer, and then at college my dad got me a computer. He actually got me – he cosigned for a loan for me to get one, which was almost like him getting me one! And I met Brian Fiete in class and then we were both programming, he was a good programmer and I was a bad one, and I said, "Let's make a game."

So we made this internet only action game called Ark, and we ended up putting that live on the internet and we had rented a server and everything. Jason, the third co-founder was working for Total Entertainment Network which became Pogo. He saw the game online and was like, "Hey that's a pretty cool game, let's chat.” They ended up licensing the game for us, and then my Aunt's friend's parents were next-door neighbours with Ken and Roberta Williams, the founders of Sierra. Through that connection Ken called us up and was just like, "This is kind of cool what you guys have done, you've made this game, that's sweet, the internet is going to be big for games, let's chat,” and we got hired to go work for their internet division when we finished college, which I thought was cool because I was totally failing out. So it really worked for me, frankly!



PC Gamer: How did you get on at Sierra?

John Vechey: We were in the internet division, WON.net, and it was a really a pretty bad division in that it didn't know what it was trying to do. Was it trying to do games technology and support the next CD ROM titles, or was it trying to make internet games? In fact, Brian Fiete and the programmer of Peggle didn't go to a game developers conference one year and so they spent a week and made this little boardgame called War Dogs. They actually got in trouble for making War Dogs, right? Then the company launched it anyway and it did phenomenally well and they had to backpedal and be like, "Oh no, we're glad you made it now!" But it really didn't know what it was trying to do.

We lasted about 2, 2 and a half years. I worked on some game technologies that let you swap skin and map files for Half Life, Starsiege Tribes and a bunch of games at the time, so I ended up getting a lot of sales experience by talking to these game developers who had a need to put this extra technology into their games to make it easier for users to download and install them, because at the time you had to download the zip file, you had to know the directory structure, it was kind of a pain, and we were trying to make it easy. But after 2 and a half years at Sierra we decided, let's start up a game company making simple games in your internet browser.

PC Gamer: What prompted the decision to leave Sierra?

John Vechey: Brian and I had always talked about starting a company together, but we wanted some more professional experience. We'd kept in touch with Jason and maintained a friendship and I talked with him on a lot of different things. We'd done some prototypes on the side, we had this, like, we called it Junk Tank. It was this first person, or third person shooting tank game that we'd done that Brian and I had worked on.

So we had done a fair amount of little things and were always thinking about eventually starting something and, for us what it came down to was: web browser games are things you can do with three people. We had all the talents needed to make a business out of that. Jason could do the art, the production and a lot of the game design, Brian was a great programmer, I would do the business side and be dead weight for our initial couple of games, and we just decided to make the company.

PC Gamer: Was always the plan to set out on your own?

John Vechey: Yeah, Brian and I often talked about it. When we were working for Sierra we were like, "We could probably make more doing our own thing but hey, it gets us out of Indiana.” I don't know if you've ever been to Indiana?

PC Gamer: No.

John Vechey: It's like a shithole, but shitholes are nicer.



PC Gamer: PopCap's first big success was Bejeweled. How did development on that begin?

John Vechey: I'd seen a game that used some similar rulesets to Bejewelled, but there was no animation, no sound effects, and they were very indifferent rules. We simplified it and changed it and then I sent a link out, then Brian did a version that was just circles and then Jason added the gem graphics. So it was three days of boom, boom, boom, and then we had it.

We knew how to make browser games because Jason was doing that at Pogo and felt that they were spending too much money and weren't making very good games because they were very structure oriented. In fact, Pogo to this day still has, a game designer can do a prototype, but once they get a prototype then they have to write a design doc that has every element and game design choice already made, and then a programmer programs it, and then the artist does the art. Jason was like, it's not the best way to make games. It's expensive and making some okay games, some pretty good games, but nothing spectacular. Our goal was to say, "Hey, we're going to make these simple games and make them really awesome, and spend a lot of time and make a very iterative process."

PC Gamer: How long did you spend making the game before it first launched?

John Vechey: We spent about a month making the game and then we started showing it to companies. We were trying to sell it outright, so we tried to sell it to EA for $60,000 dollars, and they said no, thank goodness! And then we showed it to Microsoft and tried to sell it for $30,000 and they said no. But they said they would do a licensing fee for $1500 dollars a month. We had two games at the time, we had Bejewelled and our second game, Alchemy. So, okay, $1500 a month times two is $3000 a month. If we get about ten of these we're actually okay, right? And our third game we licensed exclusively for ten grand a month, so we ended up not being a great business, but for three guys it was working out okay.

Then Bejewelled experienced disproportionate success to any money we were making. I think it was getting 50/60 thousand peak users during the day. I don't know what that is in monthly users, or daily users, but a lot of people were playing it, yet it took a while for us to find the financial success behind that.

PC Gamer: MSN the first place it appeared?

John Vechey: I think it appeared on Sexy Action Cool, which was our company name at the time. We always thought we were just going to do licensing and didn't think we were actually going to be a consumer brand, so we put the games up, Bejewelled and Alchemy, and were like, "At some point we should get a better name”. So that's how we actually solved it. We had PopCap, and PopCap.com, as more consumer facing brands, instead of Sexy Action Cool.



PC Gamer: How did the company start to grow? You're being licensed, you're making some money, there's three of you. At that point, did you have an office?

John Vechey: We didn't have an office, we were just working from our apartments. That was probably, it was about a year and we were barely getting by. I had to borrow some money from some friends who never thought they were going to get the money back, so I have good friends, and we started making around 15 thousand/17 thousand a month, so it was here and there, a couple of deals.

Then, in 2001 we created a downloadable version . A lot of people at the time were connecting using modems, and people wanted to play it offline so they didn't have to take up their phone line. We created a downloadable version that people could download and play for an hour trial, then if they liked it they could pay $20 for it. Now we're making like, 30/40 grand a month just from that one downloadable version on our website. Brian and I moved to Argentina for a couple of months. I was working there when I got Yahoo to do downloadable games and then...

PC Gamer: Why did you move to Argentina!?



PC Gamer: Why did you move to Argentina!?

John Vechey: We were making money and we wanted to learn Spanish and they had good steak and wine and we could work there, right? It was just the three of us making games. It didn't matter where we were. I stayed a couple of months longer than he did, but then I decided to come back and said, "Hey, let's grow the company. We're actually making a fair amount of money."

PC Gamer: Was there any point when you thought, "This isn't going to work out, I'm going to have to go get a job in another company”?

John Vechey: No. Basically, it was kind of sad because we were doing our own thing and pretty quickly we were making enough money to support our own little lifestyle company. Yeah, you're making 40 grand a year, you're single guys, it's fine. We could do what we wanted, we were having fun, we were making games. We'd spend four days playing Counter-Strike. Well, Brian and I would spend four days playing Counter-Strike and lie to Jason, and tell him what we were working on was really hard. He didn't understand technology at all at the time, and still kind of doesn't, so he would think something would take a long time. As soon as he'd say, "It's probably going to take a while to do this," we could screw around and play Counters-Strike! Don't tell him. We had a pretty good lifestyle company and then, we were trying to find better business models so we could grow the business. It wasn't like we were just hanging out. But we were fine, we weren't really stressed out. Then by the time we actually grew the business, we were making a crap-ton of profit. We were paying ourselves ten grand a month at the time.



PC Gamer: You hired an artist, and that was your fourth employee?

John Vechey: Yep. Hired an artist, and then hired an Office Manager, part time, because I was pretty bad as a bookkeeper. I think we did this sailing trip with a buddy of mine who had just gotten his sailboat license, but we get back and there's an eviction notice on my door because I forgot to pay the bill. And there's a silence from Jason, and he says, "I think we should hire a bookkeeper", because I was in charge of all the corporate documents.

PC Gamer: At what point did you open your first office?

John Vechey: It was in 2002. The first office had Brian and I, Cathy, Alison and then we were looking around for employees so we hired two guys from college. This guy George Fan, who actually was the game designer on Plants vs. Zombies. He had done this game Aquarium, which we had licensed the rights to make a downloadable version of, and he recommended. "Oh, you want to have a look at my buddy Tyson, he's cool." So Tyson ended up being employee number five, I guess, and then he was like, "Oh, my buddy Jeff is moving to Seattle, too,” so we interviewed Jeff, we hired Jeff and he was employee number seven. Sukhbir, the Producer behind Peggle, was like eight.

We just hired some games people, because we didn't want to be anything more than a games company, a game developer. That was really the focus. I'm glad to say that for the first five years, it was trying to be a great game developer exclusively.

PC Gamer: How did you transition from that point, of being a small company just developing some games to what is now a huge company with half a dozen floors in this building?

John Vechey: I got really drunk one night and blacked out, and woke up and this was here, I'll be honest. It was bad! You know, slowly I guess is how we grew. Again, we've never tried to grow for growth's sake. We've never set revenue targets like, "We've got to hit this number”, we've never set employee targets. We're kind of like, we'll just do our own thing. Every decision came at different points, right?

You sort of see a stair step with growth. It's not this linear thing. You stair step in emotional relationship to the growth, you know. You go through different phases. So we were fourteen or fifteen people for a couple of years. All game developers, really no-one doing business development. We had an offer to buy the company for 60 million dollars, which was amazing. We were like "Holy cow”, and we didn't . We weren't really happy with it. We weren't really happy with the company that was potentially going to acquire us. We felt like they were kind of missing the big picture, and we felt like we were more valuable than that, and it's not like we wanted a bunch of money. We didn't start PopCap to make millions, but we really did feel like they had undervalued what we had created so far.

But then we knew, if we stay independent... there's all these areas that we could see the world changing, right? We could tell that downloadable games were going to get pushed and challenged. Other platforms were going to become more important. We were going to have to look at the business side of our business and, not that we didn't take the business seriously but we never took the deals side, you know, the sales and marketing, we never did anything like that. We took the business seriously. We always wanted to make more money and we were being conservative, but we were never just like, "Let's grow the business side." It was just, "We're a game developer, we make games."

And so we decided to hire a CEO, because we might have a vision for where we need to go, we might know where we need to be but... We had some consultants at one point, who were like "You guys are doing a good job. You've got some problems, here's what you need to do.” They were here to give us a proposal. Their proposal was, "Give us three percent of the company and founder shares and we'll be the co-COOs and we'll make all the decisions.” And we knew that was wrong, right? But we're searching for something that might have been right, a real answer to how to grow the company. So we looked around for a CEO and found Dave Roberts.



PC Gamer: How do you maintain the original goal of trying to make really good games, and the company culture of fun?

John Vechey: You know, I don't think there's one answer to that. That way we're approaching our company culture and growth, it's very similar to our approach to game design, right? We're always iterating our game design. Working on games design is all about iteration. It's doing something, “Hey that's going to be good enough for now and we can go back to it,” and then going back to it. We do go back to it. So I think, growing a company culture, a lot of it goes back to iteration. Sometimes it's from the organisation structure, sometimes it's people. We've had to get rid of a lot of people; some people who love PopCap very much and who we loved. Some of my best friends haven't been happy here, and haven't worked out here, and so it's tough. Realising that we always need to be committed to working with both really competent people and good people. We need both to have a great company. I think that's one.

Two is, if there's one thing I think we do that when I look at EA and Activision I just think they're fucking up, right. Now, we're very different companies, EA, Activision and us, obviously, but I do think when I look at Blizzard or Valve, or PopCap I think, okay, there's something there that's a better business. Not just because we make games and I like game developers. But I think it's that Blizzard, because they're a force of nature and have been since Warcraft 1, they just do the things they do, right? And the people on the business and marketing side, they're basically like, "Don't touch our studio." And though they've been owned by a couple of different companies, they've always had that.

When Dave came round, we said, "Don't touch the studio, we know how to make games, we're going to keep making games." But what happened is, Dave started to see what balance we had between sales and marketing and the studio. And Dennis Ryan who's in charge of sales and marketing for the company is amazing. We do monthly revenue forecasts, we always know where the business is going to be, every six months he'll be doing planning. He's really involved in the long term product roadmap like, “Hey, social's becoming more important” and “Hey, cross platform is becoming-”. He influences like that, but never, ever does he or anyone in his team try to make their numbers by saying, "We have this product date, we need to hit it.” It's always the studio that chooses: this isn't ready enough.

There's this trust that's frustrating for those guys because when products slip a year or six months, they have to scramble. They are trying to hit revenue numbers. They are trying to keep the growth up, but they never say, “No, that's the wrong choice”. They never say, "No no no, we need to ship it anyway”. They don't have that power, but they don't want that power. They're not trying to make it work like that. We have this culture that says there's a balance between these two things, and the product team is dedicated to doing the products, and making good games, and I think that's probably one of the key things. By maintaining that, it's allowing other things to be difficult or challenging, and it's been okay because that core of making great games has allowed us to keep going with that. That was a really rambling answer, I apologise!

PC Gamer: How does someone like Bobby Kotick then strike you?

John Vechey: I haven't met him, so I don't know, I definitely hear a lot of things. I know a lot of people who like him that I respect and some people that don't like him that I respect so it's kind of like, eh, it's always hard to say. I was a little sceptical. I do think some of his quotes are taken a little bit extreme.

PC Gamer: They were taken a little bit out of context.

John Vechey: Yeah, but he's hardly a gamer.

PC Gamer: Activision put out that release saying he doesn't have time to play games these days, but he loves games, he's played games in the past. I don't know.

John Vechey: It's a bad sign, though, when you have to do a press release to say, "No, he really plays games!" You can nail in a conversation whether someone plays games.

PC Gamer: Where do you want to take PopCap and where do you see it in five years time?

John Vechey: In five years, I think we'll be touching more people. We're always trying to get to more audience. I think that's where Zynga have done a great job with Farmville, in that there's a bunch of people playing games who didn't know they could play games before. It's really positive, right? I mean, everyone can slag FarmVille all they want, but when you look at it, there's a hundred million people playing that per month. A lot of those people haven't played games before. That's cool in my book. So really for us it's really trying to get out to more people. Where are they playing: whether it's region, geographies, platforms, game design styles, I don't care. I want to be out there more and more to people. I think we're going to be bigger.

We're really dedicated to franchises. We've got five or six major franchises and we can't do near as much for Zuma as our audience would like us to do for Zuma, or even Bejewelled, right? It was over five years before we had the sequel to Zuma. That's too long. People wanted something way sooner than that. So we have a whole lot of growth we can do in really getting more versions of our games out there, and not just to sell more units.

I don't know if you've ever played Diner Dash, but they basically whored out that franchise. They had a new one every three months, and it didn't do the franchise or the customers a service, so I don't want to do that. But we can get more out there, and keep iterating on new game designs. I hope we have new Plants vs. Zombies style games every year. We've got this thing where it's like, "Holy crap, it's a completely new twist on a game design genre." New design, like Peggle, it's just really fun, and just continue to make great games. I hope we never lose that particular thing. I hope we're always making great, high quality games.