Gabriele Cirulli was 19 years old when he made 2048. 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. And second, that making something so extraordinarily popular, even unintentionally, would change the course of his life.
After all, 2048 was supposed to be a weekend project — one of many he’d started — intended to help Cirulli practice his JavaScript skills. In fact, another version of 2048 already existed. It was made by someone who hung out on a forum Cirulli was familiar with. But that guy’s version had no animations, and a color scheme that Cirulli didn’t like. So, like many things on the internet, he took the idea and built his own version. Personalized it. Remixed it.
Cirulli 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 he re-created 2048 from scratch, to better learn how a developer might structure a project like this. 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.
He published his 2048 on GitHub, and dropped a link on a design website, hoping for some feedback. The web game ended up on Hacker News, and spread from there. Suddenly, Cirulli was receiving congratulations from friends on Facebook. He checked Google Analytics and saw, at first, that 150 people were playing the game at one time. Then he watched it balloon to 13,000 acti ..
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