The Canadian-made puzzle Bejeweled has become one of the world's most popular video games. (PopCap Games)Jason Kapalka is a most unassuming fellow. The game he created, however, is not.

An Edmonton native now living in Comox on Vancouver Island, Kapalka is co-founder of PopCap Games, and a co-creator of perhaps the most successful casual game ever: Bejeweled.

More than 500 million people worldwide have spent 780,000 years of leisure time playing Bejeweled.

The game, in which players match three or more gemstones on a grid in order to make them disappear, is played on computers, mobile phones and video-game consoles. It’s even been licensed for scratch-and-win lottery tickets. As of February 2010, more than 50 million copies of titles in the Bejeweled franchise had been sold, making it one of the best-selling video games of all time (alongside titles such as Call of Duty: Black Ops and Halo: Reach, released earlier this fall).

“I think [Bejeweled]’s done something like $500 million in revenue,” says Kapalka. “Some crazy number.”

I spoke with Kapalka in a coffee shop in the trendy Yaletown district of Vancouver, home to many of the city’s video game developers. He had just returned from China, having just visited PopCap's studio in Shanghai. (The Seattle-based company also has studios in Chicago, Dublin, San Francisco and Vancouver.)

The soft-spoken Kapalka has a Masters degree in English from the University of Alberta; his thesis, a collection of short stories, was supervised by Governor General Award winner Greg Hollingshead. Kapalka has the outline for a great Canadian novel in his head, but he’s been too busy designing massively popular games.

Even folks who don’t consider themselves gamers have played Bejeweled. More than 500 million people worldwide have spent 780,000 years of leisure time playing Bejeweled.

The game’s genesis dates back to 2000, when Kapalka and his PopCap co-founders, Brian Fiete and John Vechey, were looking for ideas. Vechey stumbled across a little distraction on the internet that required players to move coloured squares around to make them disappear. “It was really crude,” said Kapalka. “It didn’t have animation. It didn’t have scoring or anything else.”

But he found the core idea intriguing. So while Fiete started programming a game engine, Kapalka went off to work on graphics. Having designed bingo and slot machine games for Total Entertainment Network — which would become Pogo.com just before Kapalka left the company — his first thought was to use fruit.

Bejeweled co-creator Jason Kapalka. (PopCap Games)But fruit just didn’t work. “The problem with fruit is it’s hard to get seven different silhouettes. Fruit tend to be all round,” Kapalka explained. So then he tried gems. Those first stones were nothing more than geometric shapes, triangles and squares and circles, dressed up with lines to make them more, well, gem-like. They didn’t realize it at the time, but Fiete, Kapalka and Vechey had created a genre of video games that would come to be known as match-three.

Their first version of the game was called Diamond Mine, which was released in the spring of 2000. “We thought we’d make a game a month and sell them,” recalled Kapalka. Microsoft was interested, but it was in the middle of the dot-com crash, so rather than purchase the game outright, Microsoft licensed it for $1,500 US a month.

Instead of a one-time, $50,000 windfall, PopCap was left holding the rights instead. They lucked out: a few months later, they realized Diamond Mine was the most popular title in Microsoft’s gaming zone, so they decided to follow it up. A refined and renamed game – now called Bejeweled – was made available for download in October 2000.

Kapalka said they were unsure of trying to sell a game that people could play for free online. This was in the days of dial-up modems, though, so releasing a downloadable version was worth a try. Fiete wrote a program to make a “ka-ching” sound in the PopCap office whenever a copy of the game was sold. They ran the program on a computer in a corner of the modest PopCap office. Every once in a while, the sound effect would echo in the background. Before long, it was a drone.

In 2004, Bejeweled was inducted into the Computer Gaming World Hall of Fame, the only puzzle game other than Tetris to receive the distinction. In January 2010, Guinness World Records named Bejeweled “The Most Popular Puzzle Game Series of the Century.”

Since 2000, PopCap has released four versions of Bejeweled, including Blitz, a version created for Facebook in 2008. They’ve also developed other popular casual games such as Peggle (akin to a digital pachinko machine), BookWorm and Plants vs. Zombies.

On Dec. 7, PopCap is launching Bejeweled 3 (Mac/PC), the first update to the game in two years. It sports high-definition graphics as well as new modes of game play, including many in which players race against the clock to create links of coloured gems. There’s also a Zen mode, which provides endless play combined with visual and auditory cues designed to induce relaxation.

As for Kapalka, he’s enjoying his life on the Island, working out of a home office. Every couple of weeks, he drives to Victoria and hops a float plane to Seattle to visit PopCap’s head office.

That novel will just have to wait.

Blaine Kyllo is a writer based in Vancouver.