It was Christmas Eve 2003. King was four months old and almost out of money. Then Melvyn Morris, an angel investor who would later become chairman, put cash in. The company that would one day own Candy Crush lived on because of a single holiday cheque.
The founders were not newcomers. Riccardo Zacconi and Toby Rowland had worked on the dating site uDate.com, and several others had been at Spray, a web portal that failed. Midasplayer.com, as it was first called, was built by people who had already seen one dot-com bet collapse and wanted to try again, in Stockholm, with Zacconi, Sebastian Knutsson, Thomas Hartwig, Lars Markgren and Patrik Stymne beside him.
Riccardo Zacconi and Toby Rowland had worked on the dating site uDate.com, and several others had been at Spray, a web portal that failed.
The company turned a profit by 2005, the year it renamed itself King.com and took $43 million from Apax Partners and Index Ventures. For years it was a quiet portal of small browser games.
What almost nobody outside gaming noticed was how patient the company was. Then in April 2012 it launched Candy Crush Saga, taking the saga format from Bubble Witch Saga. Revenue jumped from $62 million in 2011 to $1.88 billion in 2013, and passed $2.6 billion in 2014.
There was a price. When King listed on the New York Stock Exchange on 26 March 2014 at $22.50 a share, valuing it at about $7.08 billion, shares fell 15.6% on the first day. Candy Crush mascots went to the exchange to celebrate, anyway. The bigger problem was dependence: Candy Crush made up nearly half of revenue, trademark disputes over Candy and Saga had to be settled, and Facebook's games market was shifting under it.
Activision Blizzard agreed to buy King in November 2015, closing the $5.9 billion deal in February 2016. Microsoft bought Activision in 2023, and in 2025 cut ten percent of King's workforce.
The lesson for a first-time founder is how thin survival can look. A company later worth billions came within one Christmas Eve of not existing, and what kept it alive was a person who believed in it before the product did.