2048 is a single-player puzzle game created in March 2014 by 19-year-old Italian web developer Gabriele Cirulli, in which the objective is to slide numbered tiles on a grid to combine them and create a tile with the number 2048.^[2] It can be regarded as a type of sliding block puzzle, and is very similar to the Threes! app released a month earlier.^[3][4] Cirulli created the game in a single weekend^[5] as a test to see if he could program a game from scratch,^[6] describing it as a clone of Veewo Studios' app 1024and getting the idea from Sami "Saming" Romdhana's clone 2048,^[4] and was surprised when his game received over 4 million visitors in less than a week,^[6] especially since it was just a weekend project.^[7] "It was a way to pass the time", he said.^[8] The game is free to play, Cirulli having said that he was unwilling to make money from "something that [he] didn’t invent".^[9] He released a free app version of the game for iOS and Android in May 2014.^[10]