Candystand

» see candystand.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

flash games were the second economy of the turkish internet cafe, right after counter-strike. between rounds you would tab over to some portal full of free browser games and kill twenty minutes. candystand was one of those places, though i landed on it the way most people outside america did, through a game aggregator that had lifted its titles, not because i was loyal to a candy brand i could not even buy at home.

candystand launched in 1997, built for the life savers company, a division of nabisco. the studio behind it was skyworks technologies, started a year earlier by garry kitchen and david crane, two people who had made games back at activision in the atari days. together they more or less invented the advergame portal, and candystand was the first big one on the web.

the idea was that the games were free and the candy was the point. you played candystand billiards or the mini golf game, and the whole thing was wrapped in life savers branding so the fun and the product sat in the same place in your head. it worked well enough that skyworks built more of them, nabiscoworld a couple years later and others after that.

~ the record ~

~ how it worked ~

by its peak candystand carried well over a hundred flash and shockwave games, and a lot of them were genuinely good. the pool and mini golf titles had real physics for their day, and a few of the imports it later picked up, like fancy pants adventure, were the kind of thing you would find on any flash portal in the late 2000s. it stopped being strictly a candy site somewhere along the way and just became a good place to waste an afternoon.

that drift is also what hollowed it out. once it was carrying generic flash games instead of clever branded ones, there was nothing about it you could not get on a dozen other portals. the thing that made it candystand, the whole advergame idea, quietly left.

~ the postmortem ~

by the end candystand had passed through a company called funtank, and in december 2010 publishers clearing house bought it. under new owners it kept running for a while as one more flash game site among many, the branding faded and the identity went with it. in march 2016 candystand was folded into publishers clearing house games and the name was gone. flash itself was already dying by then, so even the games it had left were on borrowed time.

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