2048 (video game)

A completed game. The 2048 tile is in the bottom-right corner.

2048 is often played on a plain 4×4 grid, with numbered tiles that slide when a player moves them using the four arrow keys.[2] Every turn, a new tile randomly appears in an empty spot on the board with a value of either 2 or 4.[3] 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.[4][5] The resulting tile cannot merge with another tile again in the same move. Higher-scoring tiles emit a soft glow,[3] and the highest possible tile is 131,072.[6]

If a move causes three consecutive tiles of the same value to slide together, only the two tiles farthest along the direction of motion will combine. If all four spaces in a row or column are filled with tiles of the same value, a move parallel to that row/column will combine the first two and last two.[7] A scoreboard on the upper-right keeps track of the user's score. The user's score starts at zero, and is increased whenever two tiles combine, by the value of the new tile.[3]

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 2048 tile, players can continue to play (beyond the 2048 tile) to reach higher scores.[8][9][10] When the player has no legal moves (there are no empty spaces and no adjacent tiles with the same value), the game ends.[11][12]

Nineteen-year-old Gabriele Cirulli created the game in a single weekend as a test to see if he could program a game from scratch.[13] It was based on the iOS game Threes, with Cirulli describing it as being "conceptually similar" to Threes.[11][14] James Vincent of The Independent called 2048, "a clone of a clone".[15] Cirulli was surprised when his game received over 4 million visitors in less than a week,[2] especially since it was just a weekend project.[16] "It was a way to pass the time", he said.[17] The game is free to play, Cirulli having said that he was unwilling to make money "from a concept that [he] didn't invent".[18] He released an app version of the game for iOS and Android in May 2014.[19]

Cirulli described 2048 as a clone of an earlier game called 1024.[20] 1024 was itself a clone of the recently released game Threes. In April 2014, Pocket Gamer reported that 15 new clones of Threes were released daily in the App Store.[21] When asked if he was concerned that his situation would end up as stressed as that of Nguyễn Hà Đông, 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."[11]

Adaptations

A 2048 variant played on a terminal using the curses library

The simple controls allowed it to be used in a promo video for the Myo gesture control armband,[22] and the availability of the code underneath allowed it to be used as a teaching aid for programming.[23] The second-place winner of a coding contest at Matlab Central Exchange was an AI system that would play 2048 on its own.[24] As the source code is available, many additions to the original game, including a score leaderboard, an undo feature, and improved touchscreen playability have been written by other people. All are available to the public.[2][23]

Spinoffs have been released online and include versions with elements from the Doge meme, Doctor Who, Flappy Bird and Tetris. There have also been a 3D version[25] and versions with bigger or smaller grids.[5] Cirulli sees these spinoffs as "part of the beauty of open source software"[4] and does not object to them "as long as they add new, creative modifications to the game".[26] In 2014, an unofficial clone of the game was published in the iOS app store by Ketchapp, monetized with advertising.[27] There has also been a Doctor Who spinoff of the game,[28] as well as one for the Nintendo 3DS, which included a retail release.[29]

The game has been described by the Wall Street Journal as "almost like Candy Crush for math geeks",[4] and Business Insider called it "Threes on steroids".[1] Caitlin Dewey of The Washington Post called it "a nerdy, minimalist, frustrating game",[9] while The Independent called it "addictive".[15] The phenomenon of 2048 has been compared to that of Flappy Bird by several commentators. Both games' success, and their simplicity, led to the rapid creation of many variants, and both games have been described as "viral" and "very addictive".[30]

• Official website
• 2048 source code on GitHub