Someone beat Threes. In other news: Threes can be beaten(?!).

Sirvo’s hit mobile game of shifting tiles to combine like numbers first launched in February 2014. According to illustrator Greg Wohlwend on Twitter, it’s taken exactly 3.33 years for someone to complete Threes.

…That can’t be a coincidence, can it? I reached out to Asher Vollmer, the game’s designer, to find out. (Amazingly, it is. Read on.)

As Vollmer explained in an email exchange, the original version of Threes didn’t actually have this ending in place.

“While we were testing the game our players were never able to get very far past a 768 or 1536, so we were pretty convinced that no one would ever even REACH the 6144. If you somehow managed to push two of those tiles together in v1.0 they would just refuse to merge,” he wrote.

A lot of that thinking stems from the fact that Threes launched as a “small game” from a three-person dev team. “An ending like that would have been totally acceptable,” Vollmer wrote, because “we really didn’t expect [Threes] to get that much attention.

So the decision to add an ending, then, came later.

After the game was released and blew up… it became a very different story. People flew past our personal best scores within the first week of release that we scrambled to add in an ending. I think it took a month or so. I decided that an actual ending would be better than just adding in higher numbers because I wanted it to feel like a real, tangible, delightful accomplishment after the long cold Sisyphean experience of playing high-level Threes. 

It would be so dull and existentially troubling if there wasn’t a proper ending.

Credit for completing the game goes to one of social media’s biggest Threes fans, ThreesPorn, who revealed the feat in a series of threaded image- and GIF-bearing tweets.

In Threes, you slide numbered tiles around on a grid, with the goal being to match like-numbered tiles — which, in turn, combines them into a single tile and doubles the number that was printed on them. The only exception applies to the lowest-numbered tiles: every game starts by combining “1” and “2” tiles to make “3” tiles.

The higher the number you’re dealing with, the more elaborate the art is on the tile in questions. In fact, your final score at the end of a given game is based on the number of high-value tiles you’ve amassed, rather than a sum of all numbers on the board.

ThreesPorn completed Threes by combining a pair of 6,144 tiles. He might not have been the first to do it, however. Vollmer pointed me toward a pair of older videos — one, a legitimate win from 2016; the other, clearly a hack to see the endgame. 

Oddly, neither of those early peeks at Threes‘ endgame screen circulated widely when they first published. ThreesPorn’s suspenseful, GIF-filled thread is what kicked off the current conversation. Prior to that, the endgame was a “well guarded secret” that only the three devs — Vollmer, Wohlwend, and composer Jimmy Hinson — knew about.

Vollmer admits now to having had no idea of when someone might actually complete the game. “It could have been three years ago or ten years from now,” he wrote.

“One of my greatest weaknesses as a game designer is that I have no understanding about how hard or easy people will find my games. I personally have never made it past a 1536, so I had no conception of how much time and effort it would take to beat that score eightfold.

As for ThreesPorn, he and Vollmer haven’t had a chance to chat yet. “I think we’re both just on an emotional roller coaster right now.”

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