Bejeweled

Bejeweled arrived in 2001 from PopCap Games, and alongside titles like Zuma and Peggle it helped define the "casual" game boom of the early 2000s. The idea is deceptively simple: swap adjacent gems on a grid to line up three or more of the same color, watch them vanish, and let new ones cascade down from above. A cleared row can trigger a chain of further matches, and the game rewards these cascades with a rising score multiplier - it's this simple but addictive loop that made Bejeweled as easy to grasp as it is hard to put down, and turned it into the template for the entire match-three genre that followed.

The original browser version on PopCap.com quickly spread to dozens of platforms, from Game Boy Advance and Java-based mobile phones to PlayStation 3, and the series grew steadily alongside it. Bejeweled 2 added new modes, special gems and time pressure, while Bejeweled 3 rounded things out with a full suite of variants - including a relaxing Zen mode and puzzle levels - plus reworked visuals. The spin-off Bejeweled Blitz, meanwhile, bet everything on frantic one-minute rounds, power-ups and friend leaderboards on Facebook and mobile, becoming one of the first truly mass-market social games. The move to touchscreens suited the series arguably better than a mouse ever did - dragging a finger between two neighbouring gems simply feels more natural than clicking, which helped the match-three mechanic become one of the most widespread game principles on smartphones altogether. Bejeweled is still cited as the game that turned matching three same-colored pieces into a genre of its own, an influence still visible in later hits such as Candy Crush Saga.