Bejeweled to Join World of Warcraft This Friday

Two addictive worlds collide as Bejeweled joins World of Warcraft as a mini-game to waste time with, 1UP reports. The story of it fusing into WoW is interesting, tho’.

In what will no doubt blur the lines for hardcore World of Warcraft fans even further between where the game ends and the real world begins, Wired’s Game|Life reports that PopCap’s ubiquitous puzzle game Bejeweled will be added into Blizzard’s similarly ubiquitous MMO next Thursday. Yes, soon you’ll be able to waste time playing Bejeweled while you wait for some sort of in-game appointment, just like you do in real life.

But as Game|Life reports, Bejeweled traveled a less than ordinary path to becoming part of Blizzard’s ever-growing massively multiplayer hegemony. Bejeweled first became incorporated into WoW as a mod created by Michael Fromwiller, a student at San Jose State University. The mod, called “Besharded,” eventually became noticed by Bejeweled developer PopCap, who — rather than, say, sue Fromwiller as one might expect — hired him instead.

“[Besharded] was cool and fun, but not very polished, so we reached out to the gamer in question and hired him to do an official version of Bejeweled for WoW,” said a PopCap representative to Game|Life. But why did Fromwiller decide to make a Bejeweled clone for WoW in the first place? Apparently, simply to battle the frequent bouts of boredom that comes with in-game downtime.