It was definitely no ordinary game pitch.

Nine-year-old leukemia patient Owain Weinert had just one wish — to make a video game. It was such an unusual request from the Make-A-Wish Foundation that Seattle’s PopCap Games decided to hear him out.

Weinert came prepared. With a Powerpoint presentation, he explained his vision behind Allied Star Police, a first-person shooter where an evil race of Flamions threatens to invade the planet. As part of the Allied Star Police, the player commands different vehicles like the Hovercraft SuperVehicle on a battlefield where they have to outgun the Flamions’ Mechazoids and Commandoids.

“He’s 9 years old and he had everything figured out,” said Matthew Lee Johnston, a senior producer at PopCap. “He had the fiction written. He had the economy all figured out. He had the balance all figured out.”

He added, “We all just sat there dumbfounded. We obviously wanted to achieve his wish.”

They decided to let PopCap’s experimental studio 4th and Battery take it on. Launched publicly earlier this year, 4th and Battery is what PopCap compares to a music indie label or independent film studio. Concepts that might be a little too edgy for the PopCap brand go through the studio where producers and artists use the equivalent of Google’s 20 percent time to work on them.

It’s a way to retain talented people who might otherwise go a little stir-crazy working on the Bejeweled Blitz franchise for two years straight. (Not that that’s a bad deal. But people — especially creative types like game designers — naturally enjoy variety.)

“We also have 10 years of material on the cutting room floor and we felt like it was a shame to not release it,” said Jeff Green, an editorial and social media director at PopCap. “We wanted to figure out how to share it with people without compromising the level of quality of people expect when they get a PopCap game.” So far the studio’s released two games: Unpleasant Horse and Candy Train, which was made by a PopCap employee who originally was making DRM wrappers for games but had always dreamed of being a game designer herself.

They took it to their next PopCamp, a game hackathon. Because they wouldn’t have been able to turn out a spec for a first-person shooter in a week, they turned it into a strategy-meets-tower defense concept. The game has a four-lane battlefield where the Mechazoids and Commandoids gradually progress from right to left on the screen.

Over the next 2 1/2 months, they refined the game and Weinert came in weekly, acting like the executive producer on the game by critiquing the look and feel of the game.

“He was directing us like the producer and lead designer, giving us art feedback and we were trying to do everything he was telling us to do,” Johnston said. “When you think about what his family is going through, it’s got to be incredibly difficult. This was a nice thing where he had something to do to take his mind off his day-to-day reality.”

Finally after weeks of tinkering, the game felt right. PopCap hosted a launch party where Weinert rolled in inside a limo with all of his friends.

He sat down and instantly started playing it. He beat the game on his first try.

“He was talking to all of his friends about the elements of the game,” Johnston said. “And we realized his design so closely, he was able to explain every little detail.”