For PopCap, it was never about making "casual" games. In fact, when the company started in 2000 with the incredible breakout hit Bejeweled, the term "casual" was not even in common use. At the time, PopCap was creating "puzzle games." And though they weren't all gems, Bejeweled started what has become a PopCap tradition of quality games that have come to be accepted by the mass market - casual, hardcore, young and old - on nearly every platform out there.

"We decided that whatever kind of games you make, if you make them well, then everybody is going to enjoy themselves," PopCap co-founder and CEO Jason Kapalka said. "If we had any sort of corporate motto, it would be that."

Kapalka's involvement in the gaming industry started in the early 1990s, when he wrote for Computer Gaming World. Then he got a job with an Internet startup in 1995, when the Internet was just a startup itself. That company's business plan changed several times, starting on the hardcore side and eventually becoming the casual gaming portal Pogo.com, Kapalka said. While working there, Kapalka met Brian Fiete and John Vechey, and the three would go on to found PopCap in 2000.

"We were all kind of sick of our jobs and thought we could do a better job on our own," Kapalka said. "So we quit and started PopCap."

The trio didn't have much of a business plan to start, Kapalka said. They weren't designing the next great portal for online games, but simply hoping to make a few good titles and sell them back to the likes of Pogo, Microsoft and Yahoo. But then the dotcom bubble popped around 2000, and Kapalka and his partners became nervous about the prospects for their work. So they tried something different - a deluxe, downloadable edition of their hit web game Bejeweled. While the idea of downloadable games is a centerpiece for today's market, it was only a step above the fringe practices of shareware at the time, Kapalka said.

"I remember people saying, 'Why would anyone pay money for this game they can get on the net for free?'" he recalled. "And we weren't too sure if they would or wouldn't, but we didn't have any better ideas, so we thought we'd try that out."

The idea took off almost immediately. Bejeweled became as much of a monetary success as it was with online players - so much so that Fiete wrote a program that made a cash register "Ca-ching!" every time someone bought Bejeweled Deluxe - and soon PopCap found itself trying to convince companies like Yahoo and Microsoft that downloadable was a viable replacement for the old-school advertising model, Kapalka said.

Bejeweled remains the biggest title in PopCap's library, and has helped to fund the experimentation that has led to more recent hit titles like the 2007 release of Peggle, and the 2009 release of Plants vs. Zombies, both of which captured the attention of hardcore gamers and media as much as the mass market of casual games, Kapalka said. Most casual games cite an older female audience as its majority demographic, and PopCap isn't necessarily an exception to that, but Kapalka said the company has worked hard not to box itself into a particular audience, which has opened it up to more people.

There is a great difference in PopCap's audience based on each game. Titles like Zuma and Peggle, for instance, bring in a different type of gamer than Plants vs Zombies has since its release in May, Kapalka said. Similarly, there is a different audience for the same game based on the platform on which it is released. Different people are playing on PC and the iPhone than when PopCap releases a game to Xbox 360, which isn't typically owned by middle-aged women. Though it seems common as of late, the hardcore media attention for PopCap didn't really exist before the company decided to include a free version of Peggle with The Orange Box on Valve's Steam service.

"That was a really strange thing, and we weren't too sure whether that was going to work out for us or not," Kapalka said. "We thought there was a good chance the Valve community would just freak out and wonder, 'Why is this Peggle in The Orange Box with Portal and Team Fortress?'"

"But as it turns out, they really liked it," he said. "So to this day Peggle still sells really well on Steam."

Plants vs Zombies, a tower-defense game in which players protect a garden against an invading zombie horde, has found similar success, creating buzz as a contender for not only casual game of the year, but PC game of the year as well. Still, the attention isn't necessarily universal to PopCap's catalog, and Kapalka said the hardcore mags are definitely selective in which games they pick up on. And despite the fact that the company existed before the term, Kapalka said he embraces the "casual" branding of the company.

"It doesn't really bother me," he said. "I think that it's a useful label, sometimes, in terms of projecting the idea that the games are for more than just the classic, hardcore player. It has become a bit overused now. It's difficult - when you look around, you can find practically everything is casual if you want to stretch it far enough."

"I have a feeling in a few more years people won't be saying 'casual games' anymore, because so many games will effectively be casual that it would be kind of pointless," he said. "It would be like talking about casual movies. There's no such thing as a casual movie; there are mainstream movies. And that might be the direction we're heading."

PopCap's website features a section with a number of statistics pertaining to the company - things like 180 employees, 24 awards won, and more than 25 million sales of Bejeweled. But the most interesting figure may be "number of hours consumed playing PopCap games across all platforms each year" - 2 billion!

PopCap has brought its premiere titles to a variety of platforms, from downloadable console hubs, to handhelds, to mobile devices and most recently to Facebook, with Bejeweled collecting 10 million players on that application over the last year alone. But one thing stays the same no matter what platform gamers utilize to play PopCap games - they're addicting.

Kapalka said the key to that addictive formula has nothing to do with focus groups. PopCap primarily decides if a game is good based on the personal enjoyment they get from it, as well as testing the title on their friends and family.

"We basically try to make games that we enjoy ourselves," Kapalka said. "If you like the game, you assume that other people will like the game, but you want to make sure you take down all obstacles to them getting to enjoy it. That means making it as accessible as possible - you have a really easy learning curve and make sure it doesn't turn people off because of graphics or other things."

PopCap has also maintained a tradition of offering almost all of their games in an abbreviated free form online. Many offer a wealth of gameplay, but only a portion of what the full game contains. There are hours upon hours of free gaming available on the site, but the idea is that eventually gamers will get hooked on a few and purchase the full versions. Kapalka said the surge of the downloadable games market has made the free online titles slightly less important, but they are still useful as a sort of marketing tool for the games, where between 1 and 4 percent of people who play for free eventually buy the full edition.

"It's kind of a game of numbers," he explained. "You need to get it out to a large number of people before you make any money. Fortunately, there are a large number of people who play those games."

PopCap's plans for the future are invested in a number of projects, but the biggest thing the company is keeping an eye on is social gaming. Though Bejeweled has become a success on Facebook, Kapalka admits the company probably should have gotten involved in the social gaming scene sooner. Spotting the trends with staying power and the fads is an ongoing challenge, he said. He added that he thinks the social gaming scene will have staying power and bring people back to online multiplayer games. No matter what the future holds, Kapalka said the concentration is always on making good games utilizing the technology people are going to use for years down the road.

"There are some business plans that would have had us pumping out a bunch of Bejeweled sequels every year and we've taken our time with that," he said. "We really didn't want to do that anyways. We really wanted to try to make new games. I think that's worked out for us."

For more info, popcap.com