When Italian web developer Gabriele Cirulli published his web-based open-source puzzle game project in 2014, he never expected it to become a massive global phenomenon. Cirulli simply "webbed" it as a personal coding weekend project with the primary use of passing time. 2048 is a game that relies on its deep strategy and simplicity, and was easily understandable allowing almost anyone to be able to play and enjoy it. Foremost, it was a puzzle game and categorized to be one of the best and innovative examples of a Merge Game.

Written in JavaScript and CSS over a single weekend, the game was published open-source, resulting in thousands of clones and app versions flooding the mobile market. To provide authenticity for the game, Cirulli later published the official versions of the game for both Android and IOS. Today, 2048 is handled by the development studio Solebon LLC.

As a Merge Game, 2048 focuses on the most simplest and addictive mathematical core of the genre, basically, combine like numbered tiles in a 4 x 4 grid by swiping the entire tile group directionally, thus creating a higher tiled number by the result of positional combinations. A 4 and a 4 combined, creates an 8, and an 8 combined with another 8 creates a 16, and so on and so forth.

The merge objective is to combine like tiles to get to the number 2048. This is easier than it looks because the player has to decide and use strategy on which direction to move the tile group so that like tiles can combine and free the space of one of them. Two 32's combined will become a single 64 leaving one of the 32's space blank. This is where the dynamics of the game moves forward.

As the player combines and creates a higher numbered tile, grid space is blanked to receive a new tile. Free spaces also means that you can still move the tiles strategically to combine more like tiles, get higher numbers, and continue creating more free space to be able to slide the tiles. The player must balance and adjust the spaces, the number tiles, and the slides or swipes in order to get the highest numbers into a corner and keep building them up till they reach 2048. This is where the Merge Mechanics of the game shines.

The Inspiration of The Game

2048 influenced mainstream Merge Game development because of the basic simplicity of its gameplay. Using the fundamental "sliding and combining" game mechanic, Gabriele Cirulli made use of an intuitive "base-2" doubling rule where any two identical items would merge smoothly. What's more, because the original code was published open-source, thousands of developers all over the world began experimenting with his formula. This created an unprecedented wave of innovation that led to clean, incremental progression loops in succeeding Merge Game designs, core-based on 2048 themes.

This led to a very strong influence on the incoming multi-billion-dollar modern mobile Merge genre that recognized the core success of 2048 originated from the mental satisfaction and reward of condensing clutter to achieve a resulting item of higher value, directly influencing Merge sub-genres like "Merge-3" and "Meta-merge", seen in Merge Games like Merge Dragons and Merge Mansion using Fantasy creatures and home renovation tools respectively instead of numbers. Many other games have made use of the core concepts of 2048 to create awesome and creative gameplays in the Merge Game genre which continues till today.

2048 as well as 2048 games may be simple strategic and numerical game puzzles, but the core ideas they present to the gaming world ended up in continually shaping the progressive-oriented gameplay that Merge Games are well known for, proving that even the most simplest and unexpected of personal game projects may hold the key to the success of an entire gaming genre.