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. It is a type of sliding block puzzle, and is very similar to the Threes! app released a month earlier. Cirulli created the game in a single weekend as a test to see if he could program a game from scratch, describing it as a clone of Veewo Studios app 1024 and getting the idea from Sami Romdhanas clone 2048, and was surprised when his game received over 4 million visitors in less than a week, especially since it was just a weekend project. "It was a way to pass the time", he said. The game is free to play, Cirulli having said that he was unwilling to make money from "something that [he] didn’t invent".
This app is just one variant of the original game.