The games people clone

Apparently it is completely legal to clone someone else’s mobile game.

After flappy bird was [taken down](techcrunch.com/2014/02/08/flappy-bird-going-down/) from the app stores, a number of clones came up to fill up the void. Apple and Google started rejecting clones soon after. Indie Game: The Movie (which is a must see documentary if you want a look at the human side of indie game development) gives a glimpse of what must have happened with Don Nguyen. If you’ve been living under a rock the past few months Don Nguyen is the indie game developer of the extremely popular, difficult yet addictive mobile phone game Flappy Bird. His free game was sitting atop the Appstore and Google Play store charts in 53 countries for more than a month and was reportedly making him $50k a month from ad revenues.

Recently HackerNews went into 2048 obsession mode. The game 2048 is a browser based clone of 1024 which is in turn, an iOS clone of the game Threes. Threes is a vibrant game with the gameplay involving moving tiles around to form bigger ones.

2048 game was made by a young web developer as a weekend project who put it up on GitHub. It was picked up by the HN community and the rest as they say is history.

A lot of folks from the HN community forked the github repository and made their own versions of the game resulting in a lot of versions circulating out in the open web. Some simple versions include use of colours instead of numbers, or for physicists, pokemon, doge. Dropbox wanted to showcase their new datastore API so they made a version where you can save the game progress to dropbox. There are 3D, 4D and 5D versions. Multiplayer versions where you can play against people and with people.

Now the good ones, someone made a flappy bird 2048(mashup) which someone later found had a bug which got fixed in logarithmic flappy 2048. Since the flappy2048 version was so tough someone else built AI to play the game. Oh there’s AI to play the regular game too. The one that takes the proverbial cake is 8402 where AI plays the game and you introduce the tiles.

It gladdens my heart to see all this creativity flow in the intertubes.