Candy Crush, the addictive mobile phone game, is being adapted into a TV game show, the CBS network announced on Tuesday.
Matt Kunitz, who produced NBC’s long-running game show Fear Factor, is listed as creator of the Candy Crush competition series. The network did not announce the number of episodes ordered or a premiere date, though it did say the show would be broadcast on its TV network in the US and distributed internationally by Lionsgate.
“We are huge fans of Candy Crush and, like so many others, we know the ‘rush’ of advancing to the next level of the game,” said Glenn Geller, president, CBS Entertainment, said in a statement. Executive producer Peter Levin credited the appeal of “awesome worldwide IP [intellectual property] like Candy Crush” to its “great characters”.
Candy Crush, created by UK tech firm King Digital, is a puzzle game in which players match identical candies. King Digital was bought in 2015 for an eye-popping $5.9bn by gaming giant Activision.
The purchase provided fodder for a segment on CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. With help from actor Liam Neeson, the comedian mocked up a clip from tragic father-son drama Candy Crush: The Movie, a more serious affair than the gameshow appears to be.
Candy Crush’s business history has followed a familiar pattern of rise and fall. The game, designed by software company King, debuted on mobile platforms in April 2012. By December the app had been downloaded 10m times, and in July 2013 an analysis by video game consulting firm Think Gaming estimated the program was earning $633,000 a day in in-app purchases. Its runaway success prompted software developer King to file for an initial public offering in 2014 with a valuation of $7bn; the stock immediately crashed and Activision announced it would acquire the company in November 2015 for $5.9bn.
Video game companies regularly try to turn their properties into other forms of entertainment like films or movies when flush with cash, but the results are rarely satisfactory. Activision’s most recent foray into film, Warcraft, was the highest grossing video-game adaption of all time but still lost around $15m, according to Hollywood Reporter.
