Microsoft Tried to Acquire PopCap for 5 Million Dollars

An executive working at video game maker PopCap has claimed that hardware maker and video game publisher Microsoft has tried to acquire the company, with the offer worth no less than 5 million dollars.

Jason Kapalka, who is the creative director at PopCap, talked to Developer about the offers, saying that, “I don’t think a month goes by where we don’t get enquiries of investment offers in some form or another.”

He added, “We had a couple of funny instances in the early years of PopCap where we were talking to Microsoft about a possible acquisition – I think it was in 2002 – and they sat us down and gave us this long speech about why our company was worth 5 million dollars, at a time when we had four million in the bank.”

Kapalka also made it clear that no offer has so far been accepted and that the company is not for sale even though third parties made an offer of 100 million dollars for the creator of hits such as Bejeweled and Plants vs. Zombies.

The PopCap executive says that his company is not funded by venture capital and has no obligation to give money back to investors so it has the luxury of working on its own and only partnering up with companies it is comfortable with.

PopCap has been founded in 2000 and employs more than 200 people at the moment.

The company's latest hit has been Plants vs. Zombies, which was initially launched on the PC and can also be played on the Nintendo DS, Apple devices and the Xbox Live service for the Xbox 360.

The game puts an innovative spin on the tower defense genre, tasking the player with protecting his house from invading hordes of zombies by planting his lawn with a variety of defensive and offensive capable plants.