10 Games We All Used To Play In IT Class

PopCap Games are still going strong as a company today. Acquired by EA in 2011, they have made hundreds of millions of dollars from their microtransaction-heavy Bejeweled and Plants vs. Zombies properties. The former isn’t as recognisable as it once was given that its premise of swapping items to match lines is now more commonly associated with Candy Crush, but as a browser game it helped to put them on the map back in 2001.

PopCap’s properties usually featured a basic browser version and a downloadable enhanced version, which would offer a certain amount of playtime as a free trial before a purchase was ever required. Given the lack of credit cards available to under-16s, the trial was usually re-downloaded again and again under a slew of fake emails or the browser versions played to death.

Particularly notable was Typer Shark, a game that encouraged rapid typing of words that appeared on the bodies of sharks to defend a diver from them. Arguably educational for its touch typing training if one was ever questioned for playing it instead of creating formulas in Excel, it has probably led to a grand total of zero people pursuing secretarial careers as a result…

Other highlights included the Boggle-esque Bookworm and the maddening Insaniquarium, all combining for hundreds of wasted hours in total.