Bejeweled Blitz officially launches

The latest extension to PopCap’s world-conquering Bejeweled franchise has finally been unleashed into the wild with the news that Bejeweled Blitz, a Facebook-only adaptation of the puzzler, has officially been released.
The game’s been available in beta form since December 2008 and already attracts over 5m players a month on the leading social networking site. In total over 1bn sessions of the game have been played on the site, and PopCap also claims that 75 per cent of its users are female.
“One-minute Bejeweled was initially an in-house joke,” PopCap’s chief creative officer Jason Kapalka stated. “Who’d think anyone would play a ‘casual’ game with such a frenzied time limit?

PopCap’s head of online and social projects added: “It turned out the one-minute timer actually made the game more accessible, as a bite-size entertainment for people busy doing other things on Facebook.”
“The social nature of the game felt like the missing link. Playing Bejeweled on your own was always fun, but playing with and against family and friends takes it to another level.”

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