The History of 2048
A game built almost entirely out of other games' ideas, made in a weekend, and cloned by more people than perhaps any browser game before it.
Built On Threes
2048 was created in March 2014 by 19-year-old Italian developer Gabriele Cirulli over a single weekend, as a personal exercise in learning to build a complete game quickly. He didn't invent the core mechanic from scratch: 2048 is an explicit clone of a game called 1024 (by Veewo Studio), which itself was inspired by an earlier game called Threes! (by Asher Vollmer, Greg Wohlwend and Jimmy Hinson) that had been in careful development for over a year.
Cirulli released 2048's source code for free under an open license from day one, which turned out to matter enormously: rather than shutting down clones, it invited them, and the game spread by being endlessly and legally reimplemented rather than merely played.
A Viral, Cloned Sensation
The game went viral within days of release, reportedly drawing millions of players within its first two weeks, and prompted an enormous wave of clones, ports, and variants - reskinned versions swapping in everything from emoji to pop-culture characters, plus size variants, colored-tile variants, and three-dimensional versions.
This PaperGames version deliberately keeps the original's 4x4 board and 90%/10% two-or-four spawn rate rather than picking one of those variants - the same choice this collection makes everywhere else, favoring the standard, well-understood ruleset over a novel spin on it.
A Small Board, Seriously Studied
Despite its simple rules, optimal 2048 play turns out to be a genuinely hard search problem because of the randomness in tile spawning: strong computer players use expectimax search (weighing moves against the probability of each possible next tile) rather than the plain minimax search a deterministic game like chess allows.
The very best documented computer players can reach the 32768 tile with high probability and have occasionally reached 65536 - two doublings beyond the tile most human players are thrilled to ever see once.