From 2000 to 2010, one of the most important studios in videogames was making the kind of games you'd see dismissed off-hand today. If PopCap released Bejeweled out of the blue right now every YouTube comment would say "looks like a shit mobile game," but instead we live in the reality where PopCap dominated the casual game market for an entire decade, and now almost everything on mobile looks like a shit PopCap game.
PopCap was so important there was a Peggle game in the Orange Box. Valve's massive rectangular mic drop may be remembered for Portal, Team Fortress 2, and Half-Life 2: Episode Two, but it also contained Peggle Extreme—a crossover collaboration where Bjorn the unicorn had a headcrab and each of its 10 Peggle levels was themed around a Valve game. You'd clear a screen of orange pegs and hear the G-Man creepily utter, "Cleverly done."
