Bejeweled is most popular this century

By Robert Purchese Published 20 August, 2008

25 million sold, 6 billion hours played.

PopCap Games has claimed that Bejeweled is the most popular casual series of the century, with Bejeweled and Bejeweled 2 collectively selling over 25 million units since early 2000.

Cheekily, this was done across web, mobile, retail, in-flight and other platforms. However, not everybody chose to buy Bejeweled, which means the game has actually been downloaded from the internet alone over 350 million times.

Time spent collectively playing Bejeweled and Bejeweled 2 amounts to around 6 billion hours, apparently, which PopCap worked out as 60 people playing the game for 24 hours a day since the last Ice Age, 11,400 years ago.

Even our time invested in World of Warcraft bows in defeat.

Bejeweled has, of course, gone on to provide the foundations for Zoo Keeper on DS and Puzzle Quest, which originally appeared on DS and PSP, before being ported to Xbox Live Arcade, PC, Wii, PS2 and mobile phones.

"Considering we tried to sell Bejeweled outright to more than one industry giant back in the early days of our company, and got no takers even after reducing our asking price to USD 60,000, this little game has done all right for itself," said Jason Kapalka from PopCap, eating golden truffles.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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