The History of Match-3 Games: Shariki, Bejeweled and Candy Crush

Match-3 is the most played video game genre on Earth — billions of swipes a day across phones, browsers and consoles. Yet the whole empire traces back to a tiny MS-DOS curiosity written by one Russian programmer. Here is how three-in-a-row went from a hobby project to Bejeweled, Candy Crush and the meta-game era of Homescapes — and why the genre is now circling back to the browser where it first exploded.

1994: Shariki, the prototype

The mechanics every match-3 player knows by heart — swap two adjacent pieces, line up three or more of a color, watch them vanish while new pieces drop from the top — first appeared in Shariki ("the marbles"), a puzzle game by Russian developer Eugene Alemzhin released for MS-DOS in 1994. Shariki even ended the game the modern way: when no more matches are possible on the field, the run is over. It was little known outside Russia, but its design was complete; nearly everything that followed is a refinement of Shariki's loop.

2000–2001: Diamond Mine becomes Bejeweled

The genre's big bang came from a three-person startup called PopCap Games. In 2000 they released a browser game named Diamond Mine; Microsoft signed a deal to host it on its games portal, and with the name changed to Bejeweled in 2001 it became a phenomenon. A paid desktop version, Bejeweled Deluxe, followed in May 2001 and the game went on to sell over 10 million copies and rack up hundreds of millions of downloads. It is widely credited with launching the entire casual-games industry, Electronic Arts bought PopCap in 2011, and in 2020 Bejeweled was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame. Worth noticing: the game that defined the genre was a browser game first — no download, played in an afternoon at work or school.

2012: Candy Crush and the saga era

The next revolution was structural, not mechanical. In April 2012 King launched Candy Crush Saga on Facebook, bringing it to iOS and Android later that year. Mechanically it refined the Shariki/Bejeweled formula with juicy specials and blockers — but its real invention was the saga map: hundreds of hand-tuned levels marching along a winding path, each with objectives, move limits and star ratings. Combined with free-to-play economics (the game is free; impatience costs money), it became one of the highest-grossing games in history and made "level 1247" a sentence people say about a puzzle game.

2017: Homescapes and the meta-game era

By the late 2010s the match-3 board itself was mature, so studios competed on what surrounds it. Playrix's Gardenscapes (2016) and Homescapes (2017) wrapped the puzzle in renovation stories — clear levels, earn stars, redecorate a mansion — and pushed special-piece design to its modern standard: rockets that clear lines, bombs with area blasts, planes that fly to smart targets, rainbow pieces that wipe colors, and combo rules for swapping specials together. That special-piece grammar is now the genre's shared language, and it is exactly the grammar our own Match 3 speaks: fireworks, bombs, planes and disco balls, with combo blasts for swapping them into each other.

Today: the circle closes in the browser

The irony of match-3 history is that the genre conquered the world from a browser tab, moved to app stores for fifteen years, and is now flowing back. Modern web technology runs a full match-3 — animations, particles, cascading physics — at a quality that needed a native app in 2012, with none of the downloads, storage, version updates or interstitial ads. The history of the genre suggests this is not a step backward: instant, frictionless play is precisely how Bejeweled won in the first place.

Match-3 milestones at a glance

• 1994 — Shariki (Eugene Alemzhin, MS-DOS): the swap-and-match loop, refill gravity, and game-over-when-no-moves.
• 2000–2001 — Diamond Mine / Bejeweled (PopCap): the genre goes global from a browser; casual gaming is born.
• 2012 — Candy Crush Saga (King): the saga map, level objectives and free-to-play economics.
• 2016–2017 — Gardenscapes / Homescapes (Playrix): the meta-game era and the modern special-piece grammar.
• 2020s — the browser renaissance: Homescapes-quality boards, instantly, with no download.

Thirty years of history in one sentence: the rules barely changed, and that is the point — three in a row was perfect the first time. Everything since has been polish, and the polish is now free in your browser.