It’s complicated and hard to express these conflicting feelings but hopefully this is a start. 2048 is a simpler, easier form of Threes that is worth investigation, but piling on top of us right when the majority of Threes players haven’t had time to understand all we’ve done with our game’s system and why we took 14 months to make it, well… that makes us sad. We want to celebrate iteration on our ideas and ideas in general. ![]() That’s life! That’s how we get to where we’re going. This fast, speed-up of technological and creative advances is the lay of the land here. The branching of all these ideas can happen so fast nowadays that it seems tiny games like Threes are destined to be lost in the underbrush of copycats, me-toos and iterators. Mario, you’re almost certainly aware that Tetris exists. Maybe not a lot of people know Alexey Pajitnov made Tetris, but of those that care about that kind of thing, it’s fairly obvious to everyone that Tetris came first. This sort of fast turnaround creates a lot of confusion and while it’s exciting and somewhat inevitable, it doesn’t make the aftermath easier to deal with as original creators. Mario is a pretty great game by the way, so the comparison is a bit weird here. Imagine Tetris was released and then less than a month later (instead of years) Dr. But it’s sort of the Commander Keen to Super Mario Bros. Threes was cloned and beat to a different market within 6 days of release on iOS. That old chess-nut…Īnd it all happened so fast. You know, “simple to learn, impossible to master”. We worked really hard to create a simple game system with interesting complexity that you can play forever. But that’s what’s better to us as game designers. To this day, only about 6 people in the world have ever seen a 6144 and nobody in the world has yet to “beat” Threes. When an automated script that alternates pressing up and right and left every hundreth time can beat the game, then well, that's broken. You may not get to a 2048, but you might just see your highest score ever. You probably could too! Just try tapping “up” then “right” in alternating order until you can’t move. We’d wager most people that have been able to score a 768 or even a 384 in Threes would be able to do the same using the fabled “corner strategy”. We wanted players to be able to play Threes over many months, if not years. Something we noticed about this kind of system early on (that you'll see hidden in the emails below). And obviously, Threes is the reason 2048 exists.īut why is Threes better? It’s better for us, for our goals. We know Threes is a better game, we spent over a year on it. Others rifled off that they thought 2048 was a better game than Threes. ![]() Especially when people called Threes, a game we poured over for nearly a year and a half, a clone of 2048. It’s all in good fun, at least we’d like to think so, but try as our logical brains might, we still got the same “cloning feeling". It’s freely available and open source, allows swipes so it can be played on the phone and has spawned many variants since, including our personal favorite: Numberwang 2048. Since, the game has grown in popularity after a posting on Hacker News on March 10th. A game system identical to 1024 with one tweak, it removed the stones. This last feature was likely a choice the developer made based on the fact that the game was too easy. There are “stones” in the grid that never move. ![]() Swiping up, down, left or right moves the cards the full distance possible. The sliding is there, the doubling of cards, the merging, even the art is extremely similar. We know how to deal with a clone, and likely, so do you.įirst, it started on iOS with a game called 1024 released 21 days after Threes (February 27th). But it’s the not-really-clone sort of games, the rip-offs, that have popped up that have our feelings puzzled. With Greg being part of the Ridiculous Fishing team, we’re not shy about calling a clone a clone, and believe us, there’s no shortage of straight-up clones out there, especially on Android. Duh.īut there’s another side of that daze that we wish to talk about. It’s still hard to address the world’s response with something beyond a wide-eyed daze but essentially we couldn’t be more thrilled. Basically, we hoped it’d do better than Puzzlejuice. Our expectations for our tiny game were well, fairly tiny. It’s been a weird and awesome couple of months.
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