2048 is a single-player puzzle game created in March 2014 by 19-year-old Italian web developer
Gabriele Cirulli, in which the objective is to slide numbered tiles on a grid to combine
them and create a tile with the number 2048.
It can be regarded as a type of sliding block puzzle, and is very similar to the Threes!
app released a month earlier.
Cirulli created the game in a single weekend as a test to see if he could program a game
from scratch, describing it as a clone of Veewo Studios' app 1024 and getting the idea
from Sami "Saming" Romdhana's clone 2048, and was surprised when his game received over
4 million visitors in less than a week, especially since it was just a weekend project.
"It was a way to pass the time", he said.
The game is free to play, Cirulli having said that he was unwilling to make money from "something
that [he] didn’t invent".
He released a free app version of the game for iOS and Android in May 2014.
The game has been described by the Wall Street Journal as "almost like Candy Crush for math
geeks", and Business Insider called it "Threes on steroids".
Due to the massive popularity of 2048, many people now mistakenly believe Threes!
to be a clone of it, rather than the other way around.
The fact that the game runs on open-source code has led to many additions to the original
game, including a score leaderboard and improved touchscreen playability.
Spinoffs include versions with elements from Doge, Doctor Who, Flappy Bird and Tetris;
there has also been a 3D version and ones with bigger or smaller grids.
Cirulli sees these as "part of the beauty of open source software" and does not object
to them "as long as they add new, creative modifications to the game".
Gameplay
2048 is played on a simple gray 4×4 grid, with numbered tiles that slide smoothly when
a player moves them using the four arrow keys.
Every turn, a new tile will randomly appear in an empty spot on the board with a value
of either 2 or 4.
Tiles slide as far as possible in the chosen direction until they are stopped by either
another tile or the edge of the grid.
If two tiles of the same number collide while moving, they will merge into a tile with the
total value of the two tiles that collided.
The resulting tile cannot merge with another tile again in the same move.
Higher-scoring tiles emit a soft glow.
A scoreboard on the upper-right keeps track of the user's score.
The user's score starts at zero, and is incremented whenever two tiles combine, by the value of
the new tile.
As with many arcade games, the user's best score is shown alongside the current score.
The game is won when a tile with a value of 2048 appears on the board, hence the name
of the game.
After reaching the target score, players can continue in a sandbox mode that continues
beyond 2048.
When the player has no legal moves, the game ends.
The simple gameplay mechanics allowed it to be used in a promo video for the Myo gesture
control armband.
The availability of the code underneath allowed it to be used as a teaching aid for programming.
The second-place winner of a coding contest at Matlab Central Exchange was an AI system
that would play 2048 on its own.
Comparisons to Flappy Bird 2048 has been compared to Flappy Bird by several
commentators.
Both are clones of previous games, with their success leading to further clones, and both
games have been described as addictive.
JayIsGames compared it to Flappy Bird "but without the infuriating mindlessness".
When asked if he was concerned that his situation would end up as stressed as that of the creator
of Flappy Bird, Cirulli said that he had "already gone through that phase" on a smaller scale,
and that once he had decided against monetizing 2048, he "stopped feeling awkward".
References
External links Official website
2048 source code