The Big Idea
Like most PopCap games, Peggle started with a simple thought. The team wanted to make a game that would resemble Pachinko — a colorful, chaotic slot-machine-type game that's a big hit in Japan. In Pachinko, you control the flow of balls that continuously fall from the top of a machine. Then, you just hope the balls can survive a variety of pins and obstacles to fall into a jackpot-type bucket at the bottom. Balls that don't land in the jackpot drop into a tray which pays out more balls and a chance to win prizes.
At PopCap, we begin creating a game using a bare-bones template — just a basic game functioning without any art or sound to see if an idea will fly. To get things started on Peggle, Brian Rothstein (aka Ace) programmed a computerized world that would simulate gravity and make balls fall and bounce realistically through a field of pegs on screen.
He and producer Sukhbir Sidhu then designed some test levels to put the new code, dubbed the "physics engine" through its paces. At this early stage, they were only dealing with the simple art of pegs and balls, and experimenting with different peg patterns and drop speeds.
