PopCap Games, maker of some of the world's most popular video games, today announced that it will mark the 10th birthday of its flagship franchise Bejeweled with a 10-month long celebration beginning today. Throughout 2010 PopCap will introduce new installments in the Bejeweled lineup, hold the first-ever community-wide competition for Bejeweled Blitz, and stage exciting promotional activities such as the upcoming "Show Your Bejeweled Love" contest. PopCap also announced today that Bejeweled has now sold more than 50 million units, making it one of the top ten best-selling video games of all time - and the company continues to sell a copy of Bejeweled every 4.3 seconds.

"Bejeweled has obviously succeeded beyond our wildest dreams," said Jason Kapalka, co-creator of the game and co-founder and chief creative officer at PopCap. "When Brian Fiete, John Vechey and I built the game ten years ago, we had no grand aspirations for it or PopCap, we were trying to survive as a company during the depths of the dot-com collapse. Little did we know we'd still be selling copies of Bejeweled a decade later!"

Originally launched in the spring of 2000 as "Diamond Mine," ten years and more than 350 million downloads later Bejeweled has won dozens of awards, has been localized for audiences around the world and has been adapted for more than a dozen different platforms from iPhone to Xbox and even airline seatbacks. The game has actually accelerated in popularity and now sells at a rate of one copy every 4.3 seconds somewhere in the world, and has just been named The Most Popular Puzzle Game Series of the Century by the Guinness World Records 2010 Video Games Edition. PopCap and its distribution partners have recently confirmed that more than 50 million units of Bejeweled, Bejeweled 2 and Bejeweled Twist have been sold, but the game's reach extends an order of magnitude further. Between free-to-play online versions across the internet, trial downloads, pre-installs and demo disks, an estimated half billion people have played Bejeweled in one form or another since its introduction.

Over the course of this calendar year, PopCap will introduce new installments in the Bejeweled franchise – including an all-new way to play Bejeweled Blitz, the 1-minute social adaptation of the game – as well as conducting numerous contests and promotions open to consumers of all stripes. A competition to identify and reward the very best Bejeweled Blitz players – the first such competition held around a social game – will commence later this spring. The "Show Your Bejeweled Love" contest kicking off next month will encourage fans of the game to celebrate their affinity for the original match-3 puzzler in various audio and video forms; there is no cost or obligation to enter, and details will be available as of early March at www.bejeweled.com.