When people talk about the invention of 2048, they almost always mention a single name: Gabriele Cirulli. Yet the game that conquered the planet in spring 2014 did not come out of nowhere. It is the result of a short but intense lineage of number puzzles, the most important of which is called Threes!. Understanding this genealogy means understanding how ideas travel in video games, and why the question "who invented 2048?" is subtler than it looks.
Ancient roots: sliding puzzles
Games where you slide pieces around a grid existed long before computers. The famous 15 puzzle, a small frame of 15 numbered squares you slide around one empty space to put them back in order, sparked a real craze in the United States and Europe as early as the 1880s. The basic ingredients were already there: a 4 × 4 grid, numbers, and the idea that every move changes the whole board.
Video games then multiplied "merge" or "match" puzzles: match-3 games like Bejeweled, where you line up identical gems, and combination games like Triple Town (2010), where three identical items merge into one of a higher rank. The idea of progression through merging (grass becomes a bush, a bush becomes a tree, a tree becomes a house) clearly foreshadows the 2 → 4 → 8 → 16 logic.
But the decisive combination was still missing: numbers that merge while all sliding at once on a compact grid.
Threes!: fourteen months for a masterpiece
That combination was found by Threes!. The game was designed by Asher Vollmer (game design and programming) and Greg Wohlwend (art direction), with a soundtrack by Jimmy Hinson. Vollmer was already known for Puzzlejuice, Wohlwend for Hundreds and Solipskier. The duo worked on Threes! for more than a year (about fourteen months, by their own account) before its release on iPhone and iPad on 6 February 2014.
The rules of Threes!
Threes! is played on a 4 × 4 grid with numbered cards. Its rules differ from 2048 on several key points:
- cards 1 and 2 only merge with each other to form a 3;
- from 3 upwards, only two identical cards merge: 3 + 3 = 6, 6 + 6 = 12, 12 + 12 = 24…;
- when you slide the board, cards move only one cell, not all the way to the edge;
- the next card to appear is shown in advance, which adds a planning dimension;
- each card has a little face and a personality, with voices and lines that give the game a lot of charm.
Moving only one cell is a crucial design choice. It makes every move more delicate and calculated: you cannot "empty" one side of the board in a single swipe. The game is demanding and deep, and its difficulty curve was tuned with extreme care. Critics welcomed it enthusiastically, and Apple later singled it out among the best iPhone games of 2014.
Threes! brought the idea. 2048 brought the speed. The whole history of the genre comes down to that one-cell difference.
A paid game in a free world
Threes! sells for a few euros on the App Store. That is a classic business model for a quality game, but it creates an opening: once the concept is known, others can reproduce it for free. And that is exactly what happened, at a speed nobody anticipated.
Veewo's 1024: the first fork
Only a few weeks after Threes! came out, the studio Veewo released 1024. The game takes up the idea of a grid of merging numbers but simplifies the mechanic: tiles are powers of two, and they slide all the way across the grid. The goal is to reach the 1024 tile. The game is free and funded by advertising.
1024 is the real turning point in this story. It turned the subtle system of Threes! (1 + 2 = 3, then multiples of 3, one-cell moves) into a far more intuitive one: two identical tiles make their double, and everything slides to the edge. Easier to grasp, faster to play and less demanding, a trade-off that sacrifices some depth for accessibility.
Saming's 2048: the forgotten link
Even before Cirulli's version, a developer known as Saming released a first game called "2048", a web adaptation of 1024. This link is often forgotten but it matters: it shows that the idea of bringing the mechanic to the browser and aiming for the 2048 tile was already circulating.
Gabriele Cirulli discovered this family of games and decided to make his own take. He never hid it: his game's footer said it was based on 1024 by Veewo Studio and conceptually similar to Threes. What set his version apart was the execution: clean code, a very clear interface, polished animations, and above all an open-source release that would let thousands of people build on it.
| Game | Release | Grid | Merging | Movement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Threes! | February 2014 | 4 × 4 | 1+2=3, then identical pairs | One cell |
| 1024 (Veewo) | Feb/March 2014 | 4 × 4 | Identical pairs (powers of 2) | All the way |
| 2048 (Saming) | March 2014 | 4 × 4 | Identical pairs | All the way |
| 2048 (Cirulli) | 9 March 2014 | 4 × 4 | Identical pairs | All the way |
| 2048 Deluxe | Today | 5 × 5 | Identical pairs + power-ups | All the way |
The clone controversy
2048's meteoric success understandably left the creators of Threes! bitter. Within weeks, their game, the fruit of more than a year of meticulous work, was buried under an avalanche of free copies. Many players discovered the mechanic through 2048 and even believed Threes! was a clone of 2048, when it was the other way round.
In late March 2014, the Threes! team published a long text on their website, along with part of their design archive: hundreds of emails exchanged during development, prototypes, abandoned ideas. The goal was to show all the invisible work behind a game that looks simple, and to remind everyone who had the idea first. The tone was measured but hurt. The creators explained that they had spent months balancing precisely what, in their view, 2048 had simplified to the point of making the game "breakable": in 2048, a mechanical strategy (keeping your biggest tile in a corner) lets you go very far without much thinking.
Inspiration or copy?
This debate is as old as video games. Game mechanics in themselves are generally not protected by copyright: only the code, graphics, sounds, texts and trademark are. Tetris has had hundreds of variants, match-3 has been endlessly reworked, and platformers have all drawn on Super Mario Bros. The Threes! and 2048 case nonetheless became emblematic of how hard it is for independent creators to protect the value of an idea on online stores where a copy can appear within days.
For his part, Gabriele Cirulli always acknowledged his debt to Threes!, and repeatedly expressed his respect for Vollmer and Wohlwend's work. In hindsight, most observers consider that both games have their place: Threes! as a meticulous, demanding piece of design, 2048 as an accessible, universal take that introduced the genre to the general public.
So who invented 2048?
The honest answer is that there is no single inventor. There is a chain:
- Asher Vollmer and Greg Wohlwend invented the concept of numbers merging by sliding a whole grid (Threes!).
- Veewo Studio simplified the mechanic to powers of two with full sliding (1024).
- Saming set the goal at 2048 and made a web version.
- Gabriele Cirulli produced the clean, open-source, viral version that became the worldwide reference.
It is a fine illustration of how culture is built: through borrowing, variation and successive improvements. Each version brought something, and each one paved the way for the next.
What next? A family that keeps growing
Since 2014, the 2048 family has never stopped growing: grids of every size, 3D variants, cooperative versions, versions with obstacles, with letters, chemical elements, characters… Every creator projects their own vision onto it.
2048 Deluxe proudly belongs to this lineage. We wanted to keep what makes 2048 magical (the immediacy, the fluidity, the satisfaction of merging) while bringing back some of the depth the creators of Threes! cared about. The 5 × 5 grid offers more room to build long-term strategies. Power-ups add tactical decisions: when to use a Bomb, when to trigger a Mega Bar? And progression through levels and badges gives each game meaning over time.
A way to pay tribute to the whole chain of inventors, from the 1880s to today. Try 2048 Deluxe now, for free, on computer or mobile.