Bookworm Adventures has been erased from the internet, and I want to know why
There's been a murder. And no one seems to have noticed. One of my favourite ever games, released during the peak of PopCap's glory days, is simply gone. Not just no longer on sale, but seemingly erased from history, from the current timeline. Bookworm Adventures (and it's sequel), the adorable word-spelling combat game, has been Shazammed right out of existence.
Back in the very early days of RPS, a little game called Peggle was released. All 18MB of it. A file size that became peculiarly important to the site for a number of years - for reasons implausible to explain it became the international unit for measuring demo sizes. We all loved Peggle, because we weren't mad. But there was one of us that preferred another PopCap game at the time, and that handsome chap was me. If I had to keep one, I'd have trodden on Peggle to save my Bookworm Adventures.
It's hard to believe just what an extraordinary hit factory PopCap was back in 2007. Even more so the breadth of their appeal, somehow ingeniously presenting themselves as both a "casual games" outlet releasing across all those super-mainstream sites like Big Fish, and a specialist company who were incredibly early to get their games onto Steam. Probably most broadly famous for Bejeweled, they were putting out a mix of so many game types, from hidden object to arcade to pachinko, managing to blur the fiercely guarded line between "casual" and "hardcore". So much so that there was even a crossover special edition of Peggle in Valve's Orange Box. Yeah, bet you forgot that one! And while perhaps their peak crossover moment came with Plants Vs Zombies, moments before they were bought by EA, for me my favourite will always be that wormy word game.
