I’ve known about the ‘power of Penny Arcade’ for years now – in fact, I’ve watched it grow. The ‘power’ in case you were wondering, is basically their ability to get a mass of consumers to go after one thing; usually a game. Obviously, that’s a power often wielded to get people to buy their own stuff (and why not) but often it’s used to push people towards products they might not have otherwise heard about.

When it’s aimed towards a web site, often The Power can crush web servers that are unprepared. People used to talk about ‘getting slashdotted’ (ie, getting linked to by Slashdot – or just /. if you’re an ubernerd), and then ‘Boing-Boinged’ but when you get hit by Penny Arcade, you get wanged. (Their term.)

I was wanged once – a few years ago, when Jerry (Tycho) obliquely linked to Tagline (then, just a movie weblog). He wasn’t even directly linking; he was mentioning me in passing in a post (we’d met), and just threw the link in on some random word. Even with people thinking “Oh, I’ll just click that random link”, Tagline’s traffic increased by about 1,000% that week.

Games wise, Penny Arcade has literally made the fortune of companies. As I understand it, D3′s Puzzle Quest (developed by Infinite Interactive for Nintendo DS) was doing ‘okay’ when one day, Jerry started raving about it. Sales went through the roof, so much so that there were reports that it sold out coast-to-coast in the US. Luckily here in the UK, it went on sale after that article hit, and stocks were more generous. I don’t have exact figures to hand, but I’d be willing to bet D3 were damn happy when PA mentioned ‘em.

Which brings me, laboriously, to my point. The other day as those who Twitter may have noticed, I found myself looking at Big Fish Games via Penny Arcade. Jerry – whose game-playing sensibilities are sometimes remarkably similar to my own (see: Puzzle Quest), had remarked…

What this is is an incredibly awesome puzzle game, masquerading as solitaire.  Also, there’s some kind of golf thing going on?  I installed it an hour ago just to see, and I just now dragged the demo to the trash.  I can’t have something like that on my work machine.

Well, I just had to find out what that was; turns out it was Fairway Solitaire, a pleasing hybrid of a solitaire type game and… well, golf. Trust me, it works. After a lunchtime of playing the one-hour demo, and doing the same that night, it was obvious I was going to buy it. So I did.

And tonight… I thought I’d look up the makers of Fairway Solitare to see what else they did, and lo and behold… I see a blog entry relating to, what else? The power of Penny Arcade.

Ah, my point. I knew I’d get there in the end.