Peggle Secrets

Here are some various notes that might not make sense until you've watched the video:

Note 1: I tried to make the stats calculations more accessible to non-maths people, so I didn't talk about p-values or anything. I thought maybe a distribution plot is the best way to understand it, but maybe not!

Note 2: that Claude clip at 15:24 is super weird! I hadn't realised quite how weird it was until I was editing. The green replaces an orange, and then that orange goes somewhere else! It's possible this is another way to resurrect pegs, but I haven't managed to see it.

Note 3: although the ball doesn't experience any friction, it does still lose energy when sliding up a curved slope, due it technically being a series of inelastic collisions.

Note 4: I noticed during editing at 35:16 that the letters of "Extreme Fever" go transparent if the ball is behind it - I've never noticed that before!

Note 5: For the full clip of the hidden music track, see    • Peggle Deluxe PC - Unusual Music Track  

There are definitely more questions about Peggle that I haven't answered in this video. If you've found something I've missed, please post it in a comment below!

I focused more on the technical side of the game rather than its development in this video, but if you're interested in the history of PopCap then I'd recommend looking some stuff up - in particular, "The Oral History of PopCap Games" by MinnMax here on YouTube is very interesting.

I took the old interviews from the PopCap website, although you might need to use the WayBack Machine or something to find all the links. I included more of Brian Rothstein in this video but there are interviews with others as well. I also didn't include it, but apparently he left PopCap after having a number of disagreements with the artists over ridiculously specific background elements and deciding that working on Peggle wasn't too good on his mental health! But you can check the discord for his own words on that.

(RIP Bjorn "Fake it till you make it" Unicorn)