It did well, and Vollmer wondered: could he do this for a living? He had published a modestly successful iOS game in 2012 called Puzzlejuice - a creative mash-up of Tetris, Boggle, and Bejeweled - that was part of a wave of indie game developers trying new things on nascent mobile platforms. “And then people started pointing out that I stole their success.”Ĭould Cirulli be a thief if he didn’t know it at the time? And would that even matter?Īsher Vollmer was fresh out of college and trying to figure out what came next. “That game was not something that I’d ever seen or played at the time,” he says. But as the messages came in, and the articles went up, the chain of mutations pointed back to a single source of inspiration: an iPhone game called Threes. In fact, unbeknownst to Cirulli, the game was just one in a long string of iterations, imitations, and copycats - his 2048 just happened to be the one that went viral. It wasn’t that he had made a new version of 2048. And then came the accusations: that Cirulli had copied someone else’s game. The attention was flattering, but also stressful and overwhelming.

“Then things kind of got out of hand, for me personally, because I’ve never been one to want to be in the spotlight … Those two or three months surrounding the release of 2048 were some of the most stressful months of my life up to that point,” Cirulli tells The Verge. “And then people started pointing out that I stole their success” Then he watched it balloon to 13,000 active users. He checked Google Analytics and saw, at first, that 150 people were playing the game at one time. Suddenly, Cirulli was receiving congratulations from friends on Facebook. The web game ended up on Hacker News, and spread from there. He published his 2048 on GitHub, and dropped a link on a design website, hoping for some feedback. But the game was more or less the same as the one he’d based it on: the player is given a 4x4 grid, slides tiles to combine them, and chases bigger and bigger scores. So he re-created 2048 from scratch, to better learn how a developer might structure a project like this. Remixed it.Ĭirulli had just finished high school in northern Italy, and was deciding whether he wanted to try finding work as an engineer or go to college. So, like many things on the internet, he took the idea and built his own version. But that guy’s version had no animations, and a color scheme that Cirulli didn’t like.

It was made by someone who hung out on a forum Cirulli was familiar with. In fact, another version of 2048 already existed. And second, that making something so extraordinarily popular, even unintentionally, would change the course of his life.Īfter all, 2048 was supposed to be a weekend project - one of many he’d started - intended to help Cirulli practice his JavaScript skills. At the time, in early 2014, he didn’t realize two things: first, that something as simple as a web game could go so intensely viral for reasons that would elude him. Gabriele Cirulli was 19 years old when he made 2048.

Floola 2048 missing action