Where will PopCap Games' megahit puzzle game Bejeweled pop up next? Would you believe ... World of Warcraft?

A version of the match-three game is set to launch next Thursday within the World of Warcraft MMO (massively multiplayer online), letting players kill time with puzzles during raids and long stints farming rare items.

The added level of addiction will no doubt entertain many World of Warcraft fans, but the real story here is how the game went from a student's pet project to solid evidence that PopCap doesn't subscribe to traditional ideas of corporate hegemony.

The World of Warcraft version of Bejeweled began life as one hobbyist's personal mod.

Michael Fromwiller, a student at San Jose State University in California, used his love of PopCap's puzzler to combat a typical, if paradoxical, WoW problem: The addictive game is often boring.

Players, Fromwiller says, frequently find themselves staring slack-jawed at the screen, watching the trade channel for hot deals on virtual items or waiting for friends to log in so a raid can begin.

"Thinking about all the add-ons that I used and what they could do, I decided that there was potential [in making] a mini-game to play within

World of Warcraft," Fromwiller says.

"I started with a simple game or two in order to see what type of games I could make. After I was satisfied with the results, I thought to myself: 'Hey! What about Bejeweled? I could probably make a clone of the original game for WoW and could cure plenty of hours of boredom.'"

Above: Fromwiller's original version of Besharded*.*

Using World of Warcraft's mod tools, Fromwiller built a surprisingly convincing copy of PopCap's game, which he called Besharded. His feat did not go unnoticed by the Seattle-based publisher of the original.

"[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," PopCap representative Garth Chouteau said in an e-mail to Wired.com.

Blizzard did not respond to requests for comment.

When asked why Blizzard would show no opposition to adding a competitor's game within their game, Chouteau said: "I think there may be some Bejeweled fans over there."

Images courtesy PopCap Games

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