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PopCap wishes they came up with Puzzle Quest

Bejeweled is a puzzle game phenomenom. Making over $500 million dollars in revenue for PopCap, it is one of the top 10 bestselling videogames of all time. It's also one of just two puzzle games that have been inducted into the Computer Gaming World Hall of Fame (the other is Tetris) and the Guinness World Records has Bejewled listed as "The Most Popular Puzzle Game Series of the Century."

Of course, when a game idea reaches this amount of success, it inspires a substantial number of copies and clones in the games industry. For Chief creative officer and one of the founders of Popcap, Jason Kapalka, many of them were "depressing". One game, however, managed to do something special with the match-three puzzle idea, and that was Infinite Interactive's Puzzle/RPG hybrid, Puzzle Quest.

From an interview with the Escapist magazine....

Kapalka's a fan of Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, the match-three-RPG hybrid developed by Infinite Interactive and released by D3Publisher in 2007, and admits that he wishes he'd thought of it, calling it "a really cool idea."

PopCap came out with a Puzzle Quest inspired game in cooperation with RPG giants, Square Enix, called Gyromancer. For Kapalka, it was an interesting experiment which showed that making a Puzzle Quest type of game certainly isn't as easy as initially thought...

As an experiment, I don't know if it was completely successful but it was interesting. What it also proved was that Puzzle Quest was a lot harder to do than it looked.