Peggle is not particularly old. Intellectually, at least, I know that. But it comes from an era that, despite being relatively recent, still feels extremely distant. I could tell you that Peggle was released in 2007 – I just checked – but that’s not the best way of explaining how much time has passed in this peculiar gap of 18 years.
So let’s try this instead. Peggle was the first game I ever saw that ran funny messages when the loading bar was inching towards completion. Peggle was a bit of an outlier on Steam when it first launched, to the degree that I spent a good part of those years writing about the strange new phenomena of “casual” games – although Peggle is anything but casual.
More? Peggle – I know this, because I just downloaded it – is 19 MB in size. Actually it’s just under that. I rounded up, . I always think of Space Giraffe, which clocks in just under 50 MB if memory serves, as being the perfect compact game. And then I think of those blue 3.5 inch disks I used to carry around at university and the floor starts to spin beneath me.
To put it in yet another different way, when Peggle was first out, I was still regularly visiting the “Interestingness” tab on Flickr. Flickr was in its prime, in fact. I was checking it regularly and so were all my friends. I went on a press trip to Seattle to see the PopCap team that made Peggle, and I used a spare day to visit the Central Library in Seattle, which is now my favourite building in the whole world, give or take the LA Water and Power building. (Do check the library out if you get a chance.) And then when I got home from Seattle, I looked up the library on Interestingness on Flickr and realised it was where I had first had the idea to go and visit it.