A Weekend Project
That Wouldn't Quit
Honestly it started because one of us kept getting hit with paywalls in games that were supposedly free, and complained about it enough that the other one said "fine, let's just build our own then." That was basically the whole pitch meeting.
Mystic Mermaids got built in spare evenings, mostly after the day job, mostly running on too much coffee. It wasn't supposed to turn into a whole site — it was meant to be one game we could mess around with after work.
A handful of people found it, liked it more than expected, and started asking for a second game. So Magic Underwater got added a while later. Same deal as before: nothing to buy, no accounts, no tricks.