I was looking around for stuff, and that's when I came across that game that Brian and John were working on, ARC, which I guess was kind of ahead of its time in a lot of ways in 1997. Over the next couple of years, they started getting into more original online games, and that was where I was starting to be kind of a game producer.
Total Entertainment Network, at the time, was trying to do hardcore games like Duke Nukem and so forth. I had just gotten an email address, I think, the week before or so. In 1995, we didn't really know what the internet was basically, AOL was the internet. One of the editors from there had quit and gone and joined this internet startup he gave me a call. JK: Yeah, I had started working at the Total Entertainment Network around '95, and earlier, before that, I had been a writer for Computer Gaming World. So John and I dropped out of college and went to work for Sierra in their online gaming division. We had the credentials of having built an internet game already, so we weren't really too interested in the college experience, or graduating, or doing any of that stuff. They ended up licensing the product from us, and we started talking to Sierra Online about going to work for them and dropping out of college. So we flew out there and met Jason and got along pretty well. Total Entertainment Network flew us out to San Francisco to talk about potentially licensing the game and developing it into a real product. It was still our freshman year of college. We didn't really have a company or anything we just had made that prototype of a game that was up on the internet. Jason was working for the Total Entertainment Network at that time, and he saw the game, sent us an email, and was kind of interested in finding out what we wanted to do with it. So we put that up on the internet and only spent a couple of months doing the initial development on it. We just kind of started with this very simple game that you could join in very easily and play against other people, but in kind of a flying saucer capture-the-flag type game. There was this game called Subspace it was sort of popular, but you had to have a pretty decent connection to be able to play it. It was kind of like back in the old days when there weren't too many action internet games. So John and I were in college in computer science class, and we had kind of decided to work on a side project and try to build an internet game. When I went to college, in my freshman year I met John, one of the other founders, and he was in one of my computer science classes. In short, this article serves as a guide to PopCap's way of thinking about and developing games.īrian, could we talk about your background before PopCap?īF: Sure. You'll also find out more about the process and priorities of the hugely successful company. You'll learn how those convictions shaped the way the company operates today. What you'll find here is a candid look into how two of the company's founders viewed the casual games market at its inception, how that informed their decisions when founding the company. Recently Gamasutra had a chance to talk to founders Brian Fiete and Jason Kapalka - John Vechey was traveling and unavailable - about the circumstances around the company's founding and its last 10 years of operation.
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