12 things in Fallout 4 they don't tell you – but you really need to know

“We will all go together when we go,” sang the satirist Tom Lehrer of the nuclear arms race. “What a comforting fact that is to know.” But how wrong he was: Bethesda’s Fallout 4 gives us a post-apocalypse jam packed with survivors, mutations, and all sorts of opportunities for the entrepreneurial survivor.

Much of the appeal of a Bethesda game lies in creating your own adventure in the enormous spaces they provide, but Fallout 4’s many depths are poorly served by the tutorials – even central mechanics are explained with cursory text windows, soon forgotten, or sometimes never touched on at all.

Consequently, some of this world’s real magic can only be found by poking around. Here are some tips about where to look, starring our own character – who, entirely coincidentally, bears a passing resemblance to Jeremy Corbyn.

1. Settlements
There’s a lot of fun in Fallout 4’s Settlements, and if you want to unlock them as quickly as possible, follow the Minutemen questline that starts in the game’s early stages. The first time you meet them everything ends up back at Sanctuary, which is a fine starting point – and even better when you find this hidden basement containing three gold bars and other lovely loot.
Two things are badly explained. The first is that you connect up your power supply by opening the workshop menu and looking for the “connect wire” prompt at the bottom of the screen: laugh all you want but this frustrated me for ages. The second is that once you’ve set up crops or trading stations, you need to assign settlers – also done using the workshop menu. Build a fetching bell like this to pull them all together easily.


This is key to supply lines, which I unlocked and then failed to use for about 10 hours. The upgrade description reads like it works automatically, but you have to assign a settler to cover specific routes – again, through the workshop menu once the option’s available. Some of this is lack of explanation, some is just bad interface design.

2. Massive Damage!
The size of your gun matters, but also incredibly important in Fallout 4 is what your enemy’s resistant to. It’s easy to ignore this but simple to check with the early ‘Awareness’ upgrade for your Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting Systems (VATs) – which shows symbols for the damage types alongside a defence value from low to high. Focusing on using the right weapon scores faster kills and saves wasted ammunition: it’s a critical skill.

3. Hide!
At the top of the bad-explanation list goes the utility of the basic crouch. When you crouch an icon reading [hidden] will appear, indicating your character’s entered stealth mode – and Bethesda’s enemy AI is idiotic, so it’s much easier to hide in plain sight than you’d think. On top of this, if you’re spotted, crouch behind cover and your character will actually take cover – and can lean out at the edges to aim.

4. The Lone-ish Wanderer
One of the biggest problems with Fallout 4 is the limited weight of items your character can carry. There are various workarounds for this (try cooking meat from the cow-like creatures, Brahmin) but by far the best is a trick built into the Lone Wanderer perk. This increases the damage your character can take and the maximum they can carry – as long as you don’t have a companion.

But! Right now, Dogmeat doesn’t count: you can take Lone Wanderer and toddle off with man’s best friend – both keeping the various perk bonuses intact and having a companion to store stuff with. If you’re just going out loot-hunting, there’s no more efficient setup. However, this is almost definitely a bug and is likely to be patched soon.

5. Here Boy
Fairly simple tip, but I wish I’d known this sooner. You can easily lose track of Dogmeat and, unlike other companions, he doesn’t come running to the bell. Always make sure to send Dogmeat to your main settlement and build a dog house for him – then whenever you need to find him, that’s where he’ll be. Makes sense I suppose.

6. Magic Jaws
One final tip for this most noble of animals. On leaving Vault 111 at the start of the game you may have been taunted by the Cryolater, an insanely good gun held behind unbreakable glass with a master lock. To get inside, you will need to become an excellent lockpicker – meaning many hours of play stand between you and the weapon.

No such rules apply to our four-legged friend, however. You meet Dogmeat shortly after leaving Vault 111 and, if you return, can bag the Cryolater. First get Dogmeat to stand in its vicinity, then instruct him to search for items, making sure you’ve cleared everything else lootable. Et voila, the gun warps from the case to this magnificent beast’s jaws – and if you trade items, he’s even stored the ammo too. Good boy!

7. Mod smart
The Gun Nut perk is an essential early pickup, because with this (and later ammo-specific perks like Science!) you can turn a standard base weapon into something like the above. But a key, unexplained thing with weapon modifications is to strip the good ones from guns you don’t want – by replacing them with a lower-tier mod. If you just scrap or sell weapons, the mods go too, but if you strip them you can acquire and use mods you can’t yet create yourself.
8. Personalisation
Renaming your favourite guns can be done at any weapons bench, and allows you to further inhabit that roleplaying experience. On another note, if you want to give your power armour a natty flame look then head straight east from Vault 111 to the Robotics Disposal Ground, where there are a few nice surprises.

9. Colour co-ordination
Notice my Pip-Boy’s attractive white hue? From the game’s pause menu – not the Pip-Boy menu – choose “Display” and you can alter the colour of both the game’s heads-up display and the Pip-Boy interface. One of the best things about this is that the Pip-Boy’s built-in torch reflects your choice – and using white light makes it, to my eyes, much more useful in dark areas.

10. Hangover fuel
All the crafting elements of Fallout 4 can be a pain, but cooking provides all sorts of useful side-effects to replace expensive drugs and medications. Comrade Corbyn is fond, in particular, of drinking some vodka before a big fight – which means he’s always on the verge of alcoholism. But cook up a Radscorpion omelette and bingo, addiction cured, and we can start on the whiskey. Head to the radioactive desert that sprawls across the south-east of the map to get more ingredients than you can handle.

11. You can go back … if you want
Fallout 4’s world is huge but, if you want to re-visit a cleared location with everything re-spawned – from enemies to random loot – the same 30-day rule applies as did in Skyrim. Sit on a piece of furniture anywhere and you can ‘Wait’ for a set time to trigger this respawn manually, the only downside being you have to wait in 24 hour blocks. I’m not saying this is fun or even practical. But if you want to rinse an especially rich building again or replay an especially good fight, this is how.
12. Turn it off then on again
One of Fallout 4’s more serious issues is that you can sometimes end up in a situation like this – where the game has spawned a brahmin inside the house that’s trying to get outside and blocking my only exit. Most glitches aren’t nearly as bad but, if this happens, the classic IT solution applies: just saving and reloading respawns everything and should get your wasteland domination back on track.

Meet Nina Freeman, the punk poet of gaming

The couple are entwined on a small bed in a dormitory room in New York City. Young and inexperienced, they fumble at each other’s clothes, his hands all over her. The camera draws in nearer, almost uncomfortably stark and intimate in the way of all mumblecore movies about the awkward first stages of a new relationship. But this is not an independent film. This is a video game, and the woman on the bed is played by its designer, Nina Freeman. It’s a long way from Call of Duty.

For the last five years, Freeman has been working with small teams of artists and programmers, making intensely personal games about sex and relationships. She came to prominence with the acclaimed How Do You Do It, an interactive skit about a little girl exploring the idea of sex by bashing a Barbie doll and Action Man together. In Ladylike, you control a conversation between a teenage girl and her mother during a drive to the mall. No matter what you say about school, boyfriends or clothes through a series of conversation options, the mum always disapproves. You literally can’t win.

Earlier this month Freeman released her latest project, a multilayered narrative game named Cibele. Developed with small studio Star Maid Games, it’s about the designer’s brief relationship with a man she met in the multiplayer adventure game, Final Fantasy XI, where hundreds of players gather and form online clans to slay monsters and discover treasure.

When you start Cibele, you find yourself accessing a simulation of Nina’s own computer desktop from the time of the affair, complete with folders full of her real photos, poems and live journal entries; but if you click on a specific icon you enter a role-playing game called Valtameri, a fictitious take on Final Fantasy, where you meet Blake, who leads his own in-game clan of fellow players. As you fight monsters in this synthetic adventure, you hear Nina talking with Blake on the phone and see short film sequences, showing her taking selfies and emailing them to him.

It’s a short but complex and self-reflexive experience; a game-within-a-game about the ways in which multiplayer role-playing adventures like Final Fantasy XI double as social arenas where players meet, flirt and gossip. “I wanted to explore the journey that these two went on together in the digital space,” says Freeman, who refers to the Nina of the game in the third-person. “It’s about what it’s like to have these intimate interactions through an online game; what it’s like to be the girl who is sending pictures to her lover over the internet and talking to him on the phone and longing for this physical interaction that feels almost out of reach.”

Although the character of Blake is fictitious, he represents the man Nina met, but is no longer in contact with. “He does know the game exists,” she says. “He got in touch with me and he was like, ‘It’s cool that you’re making this.’” To make things even more complex, his role in the game is played by Freeman’s partner, Emmett Butler, who also worked on the project. Did she find this strange?

“Emmett has worked with me on a number of personal games in the past,” she says. “So he had a good idea of what he was getting into. Filming the intimate scene at the end was a lot easier for both of us, since we know each other so well. Our roommate at the time actually filmed it – it was nice to be able to create that portion of the game with people I feel comfortable around. The voice actor for Blake was actually not Emmett, but a young man named Justin Briner who we worked with remotely. He was really great, too.”

For Freeman, video games have never been the solitary, isolating pastime of common stereotype. As a child in the sleepy coastal town of Ipswich, Massachusetts, her favourite thing was to visit her friends Melanie and Brittany, hide out in their basement and play on a Nintendo console all day, until their parents kicked her out for the evening. Together they devoured games like Super Mario 64 and Legend of Zelda, sharing the stories as they unfolded on screen. When she discovered Final Fantasy XI at the age of 14, it was a way of meeting up with friends – but also forging new relationships. In Cibele, the player can swap between playing Valtameri and chatting with other characters via simulated instant messaging, email and chat forums. It’s a clever approximation of how we now socially multitask online, seamlessly moving from one window to the next.

Freeman says that in our era of Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, this idea of the internet as just another romantic space is prevalent and natural. “For my generation online relationships are basically a normal part of life. A lot of people have contacted me after completing Cibele, saying: ‘Oh wow, this happened to me when I was playing World of Warcraft as a teenager. I was that young girl on the internet, trying to negotiate a relationship with someone I’d never met.’”

For some, the way Freeman explores her own experiences so personally through her games is extraordinary. But she sees many parallels with poetry, which she studied at New York’s Pace University under Charles North. He introduced her to the New York School: Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Frank O’Hara. She worked for a while at legendary East Village live poetry venue the Poetry Project.

Later, two things happened: she started hanging out with a bunch of independent game developers who introduced her to offbeat, experimental titles like Anna Anthropy’s Dys4ia, about the transgender designer’s own transition, and Gone Home, about a burgeoning romance between two teenage girls. She also came down with a chronic illness. “I was suddenly surrounded by game makers,” she remembers, “and I thought, these games are poetry. So while I was sick I had a bunch of free time and taught myself how to program.”

Has she ever been concerned about the implications of putting herself out there so honestly? “Putting myself into these stories in a vulnerable way has definitely taken practice. I’m more and more comfortable with each project. I have learned to separate my present personal life from them, because it could be uncomfortable to feel like critics are talking about me when they talk about the game. Yes, they are talking about me, in a sense, but they are really talking about the character I created based on me. That distinction is important.”

Freeman and her collaborators Emmett Butler and Diego Garcia are now part of a vibrant new era of independent game design. The explosion of broadband internet access, together with the arrival of cheap development tools likeGameMaker and Twine, has meant that almost anyone can make a game now, put it online and find a global audience. Whereas big PlayStation titles require teams of hundreds and budgets of millions, a downloadable indie title can be built by one or two people on a cheap PC.

The result has been an explosion of idiosyncratic titles – but also the emergence of indie gaming scenes and venues. Games have effectively become the new punk rock – or, as Nina sees it, the new poetry: “I saw a lot of parallels with the Beats,” she says. “I was excited because what I found so inspiring in poetry was starting to happen in games.”


With Cibele now finished, Freeman is concentrating fully on her current project,Tacoma, the latest title from Gone Home creator the Fullbright Company. Nine months ago, she moved to Portland, Oregon, where the team is based. Set on a lunar research station, this eerie adventure is an ambitious move for her. “I’ve never made a 3D game before,” she says. “Fullbright is one of the few studios that’s really exploring this idea of games as character-focused narrative spaces; it’s very much about letting the players explore stories rather than being controlled by them.”

But what of our rookie couple in Cibele? Is there a happy ever after to their hook-up? Not exactly. While Blake is confident and seductive online, he shies away from anything more than a single physical meeting: “I don’t think relationships are comfortable,” he tells Nina. It’s not hard to see this as a reflection on the alienation of online relationships but maybe it’s actually just about kids finding new ways to deal with social anxieties.

Rise of the Tomb Raider review – all action but too few risks

Despite her escalating body count, Lara Croft has no problem crossing borders. In Rise of the Tomb Raider, the explorer’s second outing since a 2013 reboot which re-established her as a more vulnerable yet more violent warrior, she freely zips around the world – including an ill-advised stop-off in chaotic Syria.


The series, once an icon of the British video game industry, has also roamed; it’s now being co-built by long-time developer Crystal Dynamics and a Square Enix studio in tax-break friendly Canada (albeit with a team that includes the British writer, Rhianna Pratchett). Not only that, like the 2013 title upon which it builds, Rise of the Tomb Raider is a game that has wandered some way from the roots that linger in its title. Not a lot of tomb raiding goes on in Tomb Raider these days. Instead, Rise of the Tomb Raider is a rip-roaring Saturday matinee of a video game, which has traded original ideas for popular ones.


Croft, voiced by Camilla Luddington, spends the majority of the game in freezing Siberia, where she skulks through the snow in search of an ancient, life-extending artefact supposedly lost to time in a forgotten city. More abstractly, Croft is chasing her late father, who once sought the same treasure. As well as answers, she also seeks resolution to unresolved issues to do with loss and deferred grief. Croft does this soul-searching through monologues, recited whenever she finds shelter at a campfire (the locations at which you may upgrade equipment, refill ammo supplies or craft new implements with which to combat the Siberian winter and the nefarious secret society known as Trinity, against whose agents you scuffle in the snow). Later, she also does this through conversation with a companion, who lends an ear if not, outside of the game’s cinematic cutscenes at least, a hand in her progress.

If Croft is in search of inner peace, she shows little care or consideration for her fellow human in the moment-to-moment play. Appearances deceive: this lithe, slender protagonist packs a serious punch, able to take out swarms of well-armed men, even those protected by Teflon body armour and six-foot-tall shields. Croft is able to knock up rudimentary explosive devices from tin cans or Molotov cocktails while cringing behind cover. She hurls them at her opponents with abandon, waiting for the flames to extinguish on their charred remains before plundering the body for ammunition or resources.


The juxtaposition in these games between the likeable, quipping hero we often find in word, and the bloodthirsty, ruthless killer we find in deed has become such a cliche that pointing it out has become a cliche itself. Nevertheless, the clanging incongruity remains, undiminished by familiarity, ludicrous in its continued repetition.

Familiar too, at least to players of the previous game, are your tasks, both primary and extra-curricular. Stealth follows light puzzling, follows light exploration, follows open battle, follows the kind of Indiana Jones set pieces in which you must, for example, flee a pursuing attack chopper, or a burning building. The linear design allows Crystal Dynamics to finely control the game’s rhythms, changing the pace and feel of the story through the nature of the challenges with which you’re presented. The recipe is undeniably compelling and well measured, but ultimately feels shallow.


Soon enough you learn to enter every new area and stab the analogue stick in order to instantly highlight items of interest – ammo crates, relics, rope-slides, climbable branches, frolicking animals who can be hunted and turned into resources. In this way you can read a location in seconds – there’s no need to slow down any more, survey your surroundings and figure out what you’re supposed to do. Mostly, you run from highlighted object to object, collecting, prising, climbing or reading your way through the to-do list that’s been laid out in front of you. There is, in nouveau-Tomb Raider, little true exploration or puzzle solving to do. Even on the toughest difficulty, this is a fast-food approximation of challenge.

It certainly slips down easily enough. Levels propel you forward with pitter-patter of manageable tasks, creating a sense of momentum. But there’s none of the enriching sense of accomplishment that one used to feel when working away at one of Tomb Raiders’ grand and exquisite environmental puzzles. As in the 2013 reboot, these are relegated to optional side-missions. You must discover the entrance to the tomb, perhaps accessed through some remote cave, or down a disused Soviet mineshaft, and then work out how to reach the treasure in its farthest depth, or tallest summit. Your reward is not only an upgraded ability, but also an honest sense of triumph. These are Rise of the Tomb Raider’s strongest moments.

On the evidence of these optional tombs, which are the closest the game comes to replicating the style and satisfaction of historical Tomb Raider, it’s clear that developer Crystal Dynamics is a home to masterly designers who would, surely, be able to deliver many games’-worth of memorable and delightful puzzles. But in the ever-accelerating homogenisation of the blockbuster video games, it seems as if they’ve been held back by the need for the game to hit the expected notes of the genre. Where once Tomb Raider led the field, now it merely rides with the pack, offering nudges of modest invention and improvement, but little to truly inspire and amaze.

The exception is, perhaps, Expeditions. Gone is the 2013’s game’s multiplayer mode, replaced by this score attack recasting of the main missions. Here you find new challenge goals and the chance to complete against friends and other players online. As in Halo 5, a new collectible card system adds modifiers to play. You buy (either with in-game currency or real world money) or win packs of cards. Each offers a bonus (eg better starting weapons) or a drawback (eg no ammunition), which comes with a counter-balancing penalty or multiplier to your subsequent score.


The harder you stack the odds against you, the greater the opportunity for glory. As you can equip multiple cards per run, there are many thousands of potential “load-outs” with which to fine-tune the balance between skill and risk. It’s a welcome diversion, and one that will provide, for some, additional interest and challenge after the main game is finished.

Rise of the Tomb Raider improves upon its predecessors formula. The skill tree, with which you improve Croft’s abilities, is larger and better defined. Most areas have additional challenges, and, in some locations, you can even take on freelance missions for other friendly characters you meet among the snow-dusted firs.


The game has undeniable breadth, then, but questionable depth. Like the Assassin’s Creed series, which places its bet on sprawl rather than texture, too often Rise of the Tomb Raider devolves into a gratuitous treasure hunt, where every piece of treasure is marked with a beam of light shooting up into the sky. If only this talented team had the chance to pursue a more singular vision.

As it is, Tomb Raider’s transformation from archaeological puzzle adventure to action blockbuster is complete. The result is a crowd-pleasing game, which offers only glimpses of what could be if this team were only allowed to take some braver risks with Croft’s next expedition.

Duncan Jones: 'Warcraft will right the wrongs of game movies'

When he was a child growing up in the 1980s, Duncan Jones would often stay up through the night, drawing maps on graph paper of places he’d only ever visited inside a computer screen. His father, David Bowieviewed his son’s arcane video game obsession with suspicion. “Like any parent he would say, ‘Why won’t you just get out of the house and play outside?’” Jones recalls.

Zowie, as he was known at the time, spent much of his early life on tour with his father. A peripatetic child, even one cushioned by the comforts of a rock star lifestyle, has to find home somewhere. For Jones, it was the video game worlds into which he disappeared each day. “Games have always presented an opportunity to escape,” he says. “But they are also an opportunity to go somewhere that you come to know well.”

So when, in 2013, Legendary Pictures approached Jones with the offer to direct Warcraft: The Beginning, a film based on World of Warcraft, one of the highest-grossing (and, until recently, most popular) online video games, it was a straightforward decision. “Here was a unique opportunity to take a game that I knew well and loved and try to craft something that would invite an audience to see what all the fuss was about. I wanted to give people a sense of why so many people play and care about the game.”


Launched in 2004, the title popularised the so-called massively multiplayer online role-playing game, where players quest together across the internet, fighting monsters and, in many cases, forging enduring friendships with other players that spill into the world on the other side of the screen. Jones’s film will focus on two sides of a sprawling interspecies conflict, inspired by the game, and the story of Garona Halforcen, played by Paula Patton, a woman whose loyalties are split between the two sides.


A licensed blockbuster with a multitude of anxious stakeholders who hope that it will grow into a trilogy franchise is an entirely new proposition for the 44-year-old director of indie award-winner Moon and time-shanking thriller Source Code. Jones is undeterred by the challenge, and by the low regard in which most video game movie adaptations are held.


“I love games and I feel they’ve been sold short shrift in films so far,” he says. “It’s my generation’s opportunity to right that wrong.” Jones points out that in recent years comic book movies have enjoyed a “renaissance” of commercial and critical success. “There is no reason why video game-based movies shouldn’t be able to do the same thing.”


Jones has some personal experience of video game design. In 1999, David Bowie contributed to the story and soundtrack of sci-fi adventure The Nomad Soul, and made two cameo appearances. Bowie asked his son for feedback. “It was an interesting game,” says Jones, “but, you know, it’s always a little awkward when you’re playing a video game and then a giant version of your dad comes along.”


After graduating from film school in his 20s, Jones struggled to establish himself as a film director and spent 18 months at a London-based game studio where he worked as an assistant designer for Demis Hassabis, the artificial intelligence maven who now works on Google’s clandestine brain project. It was during that time he became a regular visitor to Azeroth, World of Warcraft’s fictional universe.


It is a decade since the film of the game was originally announced, with Sam Raimi as director. World of Warcraft was close to its most populous; in 2008 it accounted for 62% of the global subscription-based video game market. 12 million players paid a monthly subscription to reside in Azeroth (more than live in Greece, Portugal or Belgium.) There has, however, been something of an exodus in recent years as players have moved on to new pastures such as Guild Wars 2 and League of Legends. Last week World of Warcraft’s publisher, Blizzard, announced that only 5.5 million remain in the game today (a population that is still comparable to Finland).

Jones, who replaced Raimi as the film’s director in 2012, is not worried about the drop-off in the game’s audience. Nor is he concerned that the fantasy quest that underpins its narrative is one with which every Tolkien fan is wearily familiar. Rather than telling a straightforward tale of good versus evil, Jones has instead opted to find heroes on each side of the conflict. “The protagonists on each side are noble and empathetic,” he says. “They have reasons for doing what they’re doing that we understand. Both the humans and the orcs present rich cultures in their own right, with people you care about and people who are obnoxious.”

Stylistically, the film also distinguishes itself from, say, Lord of the Rings’s New Zealand mountain ranges, or Game of Thrones’s Northern Ireland vistas, with a far smaller world. “In the game you travel from one area to another fairly quickly,” says Jones. “You move from fields of wheat to lush forests and the shift is immediate. We wanted to get across the idea that space is limited.”

Before Warcraft comes out, Jones is trying to squeeze in a pet project called Mute, an indie science fiction movie about a speechless bartender searching for his missing partner in a cyberpunk city. This may be Jones’s last opportunity to do such work for a while – if Warcraft: The Beginning is successful, two more will follow. Jones shows no regret at the prospect of being creatively tied up for the foreseeable future.

“You could make a film out of just about anything so long as there is a clear vision about the story. Be it a video game, comic book or cheque book, the question always is: what story do you have to tell?”

UK maker of Candy Crush bought by US's Activision Blizzard for $5.9bn

King Digital Entertainment, the British creator of the hit smartphone game Candy Crush Saga, has been bought for $5.9bn (£3.8bn) in a deal that will mean a payday of more than $1.2bn for co-founders Mel Morris and Riccardo Zacconi.

King is being acquired by Activision Blizzard, the US video game maker behind World of Warcraft and Call of Duty. The US group will pay $18 in cash for each King share – 16% more than the UK company’s closing price on Monday – in the biggest takeover in the British tech sector since Hewlett-Packard bought Autonomy in an ill-fated £7bn deal in August 2011.

Morris, the former chairman who left the company last year and is now owner of Derby County FC, has an 11.3% stake in King worth $666m at the $18 price. Zacconi, the chief executive, stands to bank $561m, and will stay on at the company. The deal will also make cash multimillionaires of other top executives.

Activision Blizzard’s games are played on consoles – Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation – and it said buying King would give it a place in the rapidly growing mobile games market.


It added that 60 % of King’s players were female, and that the combined company would have more than 500 million monthly active users across the world.

King floated on the New York Stock Exchange in March last year with a valuation of almost $8bn, making it the most valuable British business of the tech craze. Candy Crush had become wildly popular, racking up a billion plays a day on smartphones for the company, based in London’s West End.

But the confectionery-themed game, in which players must make lines of sweets disappear from a grid by lining up three or more of the same colour, was no longer a top 10 download at the time of flotation. King’s shares fell on their first day of trading as traders decided it was a one-product company, even though the business has 200 games.

The game still makes up about a third of King’s revenues and the shares have never got back to the $22.50 they were sold for. The sale to Activision Blizzard means those who bought at the time of flotation have made a loss.

The flotation made multimillionaires on paper of the company’s leadership team, including Morris, but their fortunes were tied up in shares. The British entrepreneur used his wealth to become the sole owner of Derby County, his local football club, in September after selling almost 2% of King.

At the time of the flotation, Morris’s stake had a paper value of about $875m. Chief operating officer Stephane Kurgan and chief creative officer Sebastian Knutsson will receive $150m and $309m respectively.

Zacconi and his team will run King as a separate business within Activision Blizzard. He said: “We will combine our expertise in mobile and free-to-play with Activision Blizzard’s world-class brands and proven track record of building and sustaining the most successful franchises, to bring the best games in the world to millions of players worldwide.”
Sweet returns

The takeover is the second time Morris, 59, has made millions from the sale of a technology business. The self-made tycoon left school at 16 and by 20 he was working as a management consultant. After a spell in the US, Morris, moved back to his home town of Derby.

Already a serial entrepreneur with a hardwood flooring company and a Spanish property business, in 1998 he turned his matchmaking agency into an internet dating site, uDate, the sale of which netted him £20m four years later.

Morris spent some of that money on a stake in Derby County, later sold, and part of it on establishing King Digital. He was persuaded to invest by Zacconi, who had worked at uDate. Toby Rowland, the son of the Lonrho tycoon Tiny Rowland, who helped run the dating site, also put money into King.

Now Morris has bought all of Derby County. He acquired 22% of his boyhood club in May last year after the Championship play-off defeat to Queens Park Rangers.

Morris, worth £400m according to the Sunday Times Rich List, stood down as chairman of King after its flotation but kept a stake of about 12%, most of which he has kept.

Zacconi is an Italian former management consultant who joined the digital industry during the dotcom boom of the late 90s. He missed out on a potential fortune when Spray, the Swedish web portal he worked at, delayed its flotation and the dotcom bubble burst. At the sale price of $18 a share for King, his stake is worth $561m.

Knutsson cofounded Spray, where he met Zacconi. He claims to have designed most of King’s worst games but he struck gold when Candy Crush emerged from his Stockholm studio. He banks $309m at the announced sale price.

Kurgan, who is Belgian and has an MBA from France’s elite Insead, joined King from Tideway, a data-centre management business. His stake is worth approximately $150m.