Overview
Bejeweled, originally known as Diamond Mine, is a tile-matching puzzle game developed and released by PopCap Games for online browsers in November 2000. It later received a digital release for both the PC on May 30, 2001 and for the Mac on August 14, 2002, both of which are sometimes known as Bejeweled Deluxe.
Based on the obscure indie 1994 MS-DOS game Шарики (Shariki, or "Balloons"), Bejeweled tasks players with forming matches of three-or-more jewels of the same shape and color in a full 8×8 board (which constantly refreshes itself from the top, allowing for cascading matches). Players can only swap two adjacent gems (horizontally or vertically) if a match is made by the swap, with the game's losing condition being that no valid swaps can be made. The downloadable versions also add a second Timed mode, which refreshes the board when no valid swaps can be made, but adds a countdown timer that can cause the game to end.
Along with multiple sequels, the game received ports to several mobile devices (including the iPod). It was also released by Oberon Media for the Xbox's Xbox Live Arcade service and received a plug-and-play release by HotGen and JAKKS Pacific (which uses the graphics and audio from Bejeweled 2).
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