EUGENE JARVIS

Raw Thrills To be the best game, mere greatness is not enough. The game has to demand devotion and sacrifice – something you love to hate, and hate to love. A soulsucking mind virus that hijacks your dreams and alters your very purpose of being. Turning a brilliantly evolved master of the universe into a mindless obsessive-compulsive bot dedicated to the care and feeding of a parasitic pixelated fantasy. How about the great FPS explosion? But are they games, or sports? Without human competition, they are nothing. What about the MMOs – the Crafts and the Quests and the Villes that sucked millions into never-ending social pay-to-win madness? To the noncultist, they all degrade into brilliantly decorated ever-glowing chatrooms. No, it had to be an app game that erased all barriers between gamer and the gamed.

Candy Crush Saga crushed them all with its sugar-coated fantasy of gumdrops and Machiavellian paywalls. Moving beyond the cult, Candy Crush enslaved a billion-strong sugar-crazed zombie mob. Insatiably addictive, Candy Crush monetised its way to world domination.