John Vechey is one of three co-founders of PopCap games, a developer and distributor of numerous casual cross-platform titles.
Starting with Bejeweled in 2001, their games have been downloaded over 1 billion times and released over multiple platforms.
We caught up with John to ask him about the casual industry, the market and PopCap's upcoming push into console gaming.
Peggle was a break-through title that had cross-over appeal for both the casual and hardcore market. What was the secret to its success?
Well, we're one of the few companies that really goes cross-platform. We actually care a lot about games and try to just make great games, and the secret to that is really just saying, "We're going to just start with the best game possible."
Even though when making games we start with the PC, we're always thinking about how this game would work on other platforms.
For example, the ultimate platform for Bejeweled is a Palm Pilot type device where you've got a stylus. A game like Heavy Weapon works great on the Xbox, but it wasn't that great on the PC, so every game has its favourite platform.
Ultimately our trick is never a trick, but rather making a great game first. Because the nature of our games are a little bit simpler, they lend themselves to a bunch of different platforms.
You can't imagine World of Warcraft on your phone or a DS or anything like that, whereas you can imagine how Peggle would work on a phone and it would be a very similar game to the PC version.
Do you feel constrained by the formula that Popcap has become synonymous with?
Not really. People often ask us if we're going to get into more hardcore games or bigger games and we always say no. And part of the reason is that even though I'm a hardcore game player and I love videogames, I actually find it really gratifying to make games that everyone can play.
It's just somehow artistically and professionally a lot more fun, and the cool thing is that we get to take this simple puzzle game genre, these casual games, and ask how we can put a lot of awesome elements into it.
For us, a lot of the fun comes from pushing the boundaries of what it means to make a simple game and make it really awesome and contain a lot of depth, but always make it so it never has a lot of complexity.
Do you find that Popcap games can reach the level of depth of the more traditional games you'd find on the Xbox 360?
I think we can destroy the depth of most Xbox and console games. It's arrogant to say, but I think that most of the games on the Xbox and PC aimed at hardcore gaming add complexity but they don't actually have depth.
I mean, the deepest game in the world is chess, and the more you play it the more you get out of it and the more you learn about it. There's a lot of games out there that are really complex, but they don't have much depth.
I think that's where hardcore gaming went wrong, when they started confusing complexity for depth. And that's one of the things we try and do with Peggle. We say, okay, what's the core mechanic that's really fun? Then we make it as deep as possible by having these extra characters and these extra power-ups.
It's got this random-based luck element to it, but it's how you manage that luck. It's similar to Poker. Poker isn't necessarily a random game, it's a skill based game that has a lot of depth, even though the basis is that it's a random number generator, and in some ways Peggle is the same.
I think a lot of hardcore games out there are really just more production value and more of the same thing with more complex controls and not actually more depth.
That sounds exactly like what Nintendo have come to conclude with the DS and Wii
You look at Nintendo or you look at Blizzard too - Blizzard is another example of a company where all their games are very deep, but they're not flashy graphics all the time.
When you compare their games to other games they probably don't push the hardware in the same way, but they've got this solidness in terms of look and feel, and solidness in terms of gameplay. They have deep gameplay where you constantly get more out of the game - the game isn't just trying to add more crazy stuff.
How do you overcome the uniqueness of the various platforms you develop for?
The biggest challenge we have as a company is how we approach new platforms. Even on the Xbox, the game has to change as the controls system changes. I mean, what is a casual game? A simple game like Bejeweled or Peggle is how you interact with it, right?
So when we take it to a bigger platform the biggest challenge is asking how the controls work.
And then you've got something like the Wii or DS, that's a whole different problem and it's the hardest problem to solve. You're not just changing the face of the platform requirements and adding an element or two - you really have to change the game.
So you look at something like the Wii, and take Bejeweled, for example. The question is not how do you port Bejeweled to the Wii, but rather what is the core of Bejeweled and what's the most fun way you can play Bejeweled on the Wii.
And that's a big challenge. It's not just the same as another console, because the control system is a part of it. We haven't gone to the Wii because it's a big decision to say we're going to take one of our games and make it awesome for that control system.
And it has to be awesome, it has to be tie into that gameplay, and reinforce the gameplay, and the gameplay has to reinforce the control, because you can't separate the two - games aren't just different elements and little silos - it's a package coming together.
I think it would be a mistake and selling the Wii short if we just put a game on there and used the old Nintendo style controller or used the Wii Remote as a pointing device like a mouse.
There's something more there and that's the difficult thing we have going into platforms like that. Even though it's really cool and exciting, it also adds these extra creative challenges that are not easily surmounted.
There's been a lot of concerns on the Wii over-third party development, and whether Nintendo are dominating their own platform. What are your thoughts on the issue?
Nintendo has always had dominance over its own platforms, so that in itself is not a new thing. I do think that Nintendo had an advantage with the Wii, in terms of they were using it first and playing with it first, but I don't think that's inherent or anything, as it's harder to develop for an innovative platform like the Wii.
And I do think that Nintendo development is absolutely phenomenal. They're challenging the problem in the right way. Developing for the Wii is just a challenge and it comes down to how your company thinks and I think when we look at Nintendo, we go about things in a similar way.
One of the things that was so infuriating when the Wii first came out was that everyone was ragging on the Wii and all the reviewers were saying the graphics weren't that good compared to the next-generation stuff.
I was infuriated, because look at the PlayStation 2 games and look at the Wii games and tell me which ones are more fun? Ultimately, isn't it about fun? Who cares if a game is pretty? It's like saying wow, there were lots of explosions in that new Michael Bay movie, even though I hated every minute of it. It's tough to make games for it, and Nintendo are good at making games.
Do you think there's still too much focus on the gaming equivalent of Michael Bay style blockbusters in the industry?
If you go to a gaming conference, count how many times you hear the word fun. It's really low. In presentations, conversations and meetings, people so rarely say the word fun. It horrifies me on a regular basis.
There have been rumours that you're developing a zombie survival-horror game. If you were to be moving into other sectors, would this effect your casual focus?
Firstly, no comment! But, anything we do is going to be casual. And I think it would be a mistake to say that zombies are inherently uncasual.
Puzzle Quest did terrifically well last year by combining Popcap style gameplay and melding it to an RPG system. What were your thoughts on the title?
Yeah, we're all big fans of it. They did a lot of things right, a lot of cool things. We also think there's a lot of things done poorly on it.
At some points it's unbalanced and sometimes you hit a wall, and multiplayer is hard to play. In some ways it's an incredibly genius but flawed implementation of a cool idea that we have a lot of respect for.
So whenever you're the first doing something, something cool like that, it's always tough. So we have tremendous respect for the game and the developers of it.
When we look at it, we think wow, if only they'd spent another six months on it, it would have been the best game ever. And we could stop making games.
So it's one of those mixed feelings. It's really cool they did that, I just wish they could have spent another six months on it, could it could have been flawless.
Is that a direction Popcap would take up?
I definitely think we're going to be doing more things that combine different types of games and different elements of games, but our development times are long.
Let's say we were going to do some gigantic multiplayer game. It would take us years, because we are perfectionists. Even Peggle took nine months of prototyping before we even knew what Peggle was.
It takes a long time to do the games we do and the way we do them. We're very lucky that we've set our whole company up to reinforce creative game making and innovative design and really pushing different elements, but there's a big cost to it.
Do you feel that it's going to be tough to keep that ideal on board in the long-term?
It's already really tough. We've got almost 200 people worldwide now, with people designing games in Dublin, Chicago, San Francisco, Vancouver, and a core studio in Seattle doing both PC and online products, and videogame platforms.
It's already a big challenge. How do we as a company maintain that creative control in order to maintain a quality standard whilst at the same time enabling individual people to make really great games?
It's a constant source of stress and an immense amount of conflict. But conflict goes hand in hand with the creative process, and at the end of the day if there's a bunch of conflict, but the game is great at the end, it's like who cares how frustrating James Cameron was to work with if it turns out to be an awesome movie.
We'd like to thank John Vechey and the staff of Popcap for their time for this interview
i love popcap games, but ive never thought of any of them as having the depth of chess or poker. i guess when i have the millions of $ this guy has then i too can lose all touch with reality and get similar delusions of grandeur and self worth.
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