Threes: The Rips-offs and Making of the Game
Threes is a hugely popular and successful iOS game that was created by Asher Vollmer, Greg Wohlwend and Jimmy Hinson.
Several weeks after their success on the App Store, several clones/rip-offs began to surface on the web, Android store, and on the App Store. First there was 1024, and then the massivley popular 2048 came out. 2048 has been so popular that many more people know it exists and have played it who've never heard of Threes. Crappy journalists have begun writing articles about the "overnight" success of 2048 and how the creator managed to create it in "just 42 days". They fail to mention that he only did so after playing Threes and copying its look, feel, and playstyle.
The creators of Threes have now posted a wonderful piece outlining all of this and releasing the entirely of their email chain between themselves over the year in which Threes was created.
It’s been a weird and awesome couple of months. Our expectations for our tiny game were well, fairly tiny. Basically, we hoped it’d do better than Puzzlejuice. It did. By a lot. 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. Duh.
But there’s another side of that daze that we wish to talk about. The rip-offs.