. They set it up, I sat down and, within five minutes, I was completely hooked on Super Mario Bros. For the next 10 years, there was no stopping me. I would buy Nintendo magazines, lock myself in my room to complete new Mario or Zelda games and impress boys with my amazing ability to beat them all at Mario Kart (this is a skill I still hold; recently managing to beat a friend's 10-year-old who didn't believe a 42-year-old woman could know anything about the game and mistakenly challenged me on his Nintendo Switch). But then I got older and thought it wasn't cool to be a girl gamer, so I put away my games consoles and focused instead on snogging and drinking. Many years later and an apparent grown-up, Candy Crush awakened in me a childish delight that changing nappies couldn't. And I was far from alone. On my return to work after maternity leave, I would notice tube carriages and buses full of like-minded women matching candies. I would donate 'lives' to other mum friends and they would return the favour. Then, a 50-something woman I worked with taught me a hack that involved resetting the time on my iPhone so that I would never, ever run out of lives. Before long, I was playing it every evening as the TV blared in the background. My husband knew not to suggest any Scandi noir that required subtitles, because I would not be looking at anything other than the candies on my phone screen. Candy Crush reclaimed gaming for grown-up women, who didn't fancy the traditionally blokeish delights offered by Halo, Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty. It spawned dozens of imitations, which soon began to clog up my){kind=link}
Ten years since its launch and 8,000 levels in, one devotee tells how she finally deleted the app before the candies swallowed her whole
I remember vividly my first taste of Candy Crush in much the same way that I remember my first illicit sip of vodka at the age of 14. It was 10 years ago that the video game was launched on to an unsuspecting public who, at the time, were only just getting their heads round the ground-breaking concept that was using your iPhone to post beautifully-filtered photos on a newfangled app that went by the name of Instagram. (“Instagram! What a stupid name,” I remember saying to someone. “As if I’ve got time to take pictures of sunsets! It’ll never catch on.”)
Anyway, there I was in the autumn of 2012, newly pregnant and looking for a way to fill my evenings now that I had been forced to retire from my favoured activity of getting drunk in pubs. With the same fervour I would later see on Facebook for Wordle, I kept noticing friends’ posts about this game called Candy Crush. Being a highly suggestible person, I downloaded the Candy Crush Saga app. Ten years on and 8,000 levels in, I have only just managed to delete it from my phone.
To explain: Candy Crush Saga is a colourful puzzle game that requires you to match bright “candies”. Each level asks you to do this in either a fixed number of moves or a limited amount of time, switching it up by getting you to collect a certain type of candy, or reaching a minimum score. It’s not exactly brain surgery – in fact, it is the very opposite of it. Its addictive qualities are found in the trance-like state it sends you into. You think “I’ll just have a little play on Candy Crush for 10 minutes between train stops” and before you know it, you are at the end of the line and four hours late for work.
As of 2021, there are 255 million users who play it more than once a month, generating $1.2 billion a year. It is the fifth most downloaded app in the world and the fourth highest grossing for revenue. Over the past decade, users have spent a total of 73 billion hours – or 8.3 million years – on Candy Crush. And a great many of them are middle-aged women like myself.