"We're delighted to have Greg joining us and taking on a very important, strategic role within the company," said Dennis Ryan, EVP of Worldwide Business Development at PopCap. "The entrepreneurial nature of Greg's work at Microsoft, combined with his more than fifteen years of industry experience, will be instrumental to our ongoing platform expansion strategy."

"From the Xbox 360 video game console to handheld videogame devices and more, PopCap's lineup of casual games are really well suited for a wide range of platforms, and I'm excited to have this opportunity to help guide PopCap's future growth," said Mr. Canessa. "The fact that PopCap is both a recognized leader in its space and a pioneering company with a start-up mentality is very appealing to me, and I'm really looking forward to helping the company bring their award-winning suite of games to these platforms."

Mr. Canessa has spent the past seven years helping define and manage Microsoft's online games strategy, most recently as head of that company's Xbox Live Arcade service. He was an early advocate of bringing casual games like PopCap's to the Xbox Live Arcade service on the original Xbox and Xbox 360 consoles, where six of PopCap's games have been made available over the past 24 months to both critical and consumer acclaim. Prior to his tenure at Microsoft, Mr. Canessa was VP of Online Marketing at Idealab(TM), an incubator of early-stage technology firms. Previously, he served as a senior marketing executive at Vivendi Games for most of the 1990s, after beginning his professional career at Apple Computer as a games marketer and evangelist.