It is perhaps the best-known mobile game out there: Candy Crush. Everyone knows someone who's addicted to it, as something about the easy-to-play tile-matching game is utterly irresistible.
Over 255 million users play it, but few if any will know of the man behind the game. His name is Riccardo Zacconi, an Italian entrepreneur, who with a handful of others created the global sensation in 2012.
Born on May 11, 1967, in Rome, Italy, Mr Zacconi graduated with a degree in Economics from Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali Guido Carli in 1993.
His professional journey began in a field world's away from the bright lights of Candy Crush: he worked in management consulting, with significant roles at LEK Consulting and Boston Consulting Group.
In 1999, during the dot-com boom, he joined the Swedish online messaging startup Spray, which was later acquired by Lycos Europe in 2000. Following this, he served as Vice President of European Sales and Marketing at uDate until its merger with Match.com.
Then, in 2003, Mr Zacconi co-founded King in Stockholm, Sweden, alongside Toby Rowland, Mel Morris, Thomas Hartwig, Sebastian Knutsson, Lars Markgren, and Patrik Stymne.
The company initially focused on browser-based games but pivoted to social and mobile gaming, leading to the creation of Candy Crush Saga nine years after King's inception.
It has proved lucrative, for as of 2024, Mr Zacconi's net worth was estimated to stand at £410 million, according to the Sunday Times' Rich List.
Candy Crush Saga became a monumental success, exemplifying the 'freemium' model's potential in mobile gaming. Under Zacconi's leadership, King went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2014 and was subsequently acquired by Activision Blizzard in 2016 for $5.9 billion (£4.5 billion).
After stepping down as CEO of King in 2019 and serving as chairman until 2020, he co-founded Sweet Capital, an angel investment fund focusing on technology startups.
He also founded the PTEN Research Foundation, dedicated to researching rare genetic diseases.
In an interview with CNBC, Mr Zacconi appeared to credit much of his success to lessons instilled in him by his parents. “I always had in myself the need to become an entrepreneur and to have my own thing. And I got this from him," he said of his father. "Because he always said that for him, the key thing was to be his own master and not to have to report to others."
Speaking about his mother, an artist who escaped the Hungarian Revolution, he added: “She escaped from Hungary in 1956 with literally nothing, only a toothbrush. And they managed to rebuild their existence from nothing. And so, what I learned from her were fundamentally two things. The first one is, you never give up. And the second one is, actually you can live well … without much."
