Mario Lopez is hosting a Candy Crush game show, and King is bringing him into the mobile game.
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King brings Candy Crush TV show host Mario Lopez into mobile games

Activision Blizzard’s King mobile game division is launching a TV show based on the Candy Crush Saga mobile game this summer, and it is bringing TV show host Mario Lopez into the game.

King is also launching a series of in-game events within Candy Crush Saga to promote the live-action TV show on CBS. It’s an example of transmedia, or a single intellectual property spanning different media such as TV and games. And King wants the cross promotion to work in both directions. King has some built-in advantages as it launches the TV show, since the game has been played more than a trillion times, with an average of 20 billion game rounds being played every month across the Candy Crush franchise.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.