The Internet lit up last week with news that everyone's favorite casual-but-core video game developer, PopCap Games, had filed a new trademark for something called Vacation Quest.  Naturally, fans everywhere want to know what this Vacation Quest is all about, how to play it, and when to buy it.  Like any talented studio, PopCap will sell no wine before it is time and has been quiet on the matter.  Quiet, that is, until I had the opportunity to talk to PopCap's VP of Communications, Garth Chouteau, for Episode 21 of the Power Button podcast.  I couldn't let the chance to ask about Vacation Quest slip away.  Here's what Garth had to say as heard on Episode 21 about the discovered trademark:

When it comes to trademarks, we file those very judiciously because they're expensive and in part because we're really not supposed to file superfluous or frivolous trademark submissions, but when it comes to domain names — URLs — it's very cheap to sort of secure them and it's usually a good idea to do that in a kind of scattershot way, so we may not even have a game in the works with that name.  That may be some promotion or a derivative or some game name that we think someone else might take to confuse consumers or grab what should be some of our web traffic.  There's no way to know.  We file a lot of those, and it's funny about the ones that kind of end up bubbling up.   Some of those never get used.  A good portion of them never turn into anything.

Nice dodge there, Garth.  I salute you!  My guess is that I asked about Vacation Quest before the company was ready to talk about it, but at least now we know a little of the method behind PopCap's trademark and domain name registration madness.  So there you have it.  PopCap's Vacation Quest (if it exists) will be available to play (unless it isn't) sometime in the future (unless it's not).