We put this page together because we got curious where the "merge two things into a better thing" idea actually came from, and figured other Travel Town players might enjoy the same rabbit hole. This isn't meant to be a complete history of every merge game ever made, just a quick, fun look at where the genre started and how it got here.
⚡ Before Computers: Matching Games
Merging, in the strict sense, is a modern invention, but the feeling it's built on, the satisfaction of pairing up identical things, is centuries old. The earliest confirmed written record of dominoes comes from Song dynasty China, where a 13th-century text lists them among the goods sold by street peddlers in the late 1100s.[1] Mahjong came much later, developed in southern China in the mid-1800s by blending an older card game called madiao with domino-style tiles.[2] Western card games like Solitaire and Patience run on a similar idea: sort and clear matching pieces.
None of these games "merge" anything into an upgraded version. You match a pair and it disappears. But they trained generations of players to find that kind of pairing satisfying, which is exactly the itch merge games scratch today.
⚡ After Computers: From Triple Town to Travel Town
The direct ancestor of today's merge games is generally considered to be Triple Town, released by Spry Fox in 2010, originally for the Amazon Kindle of all things. It borrowed ideas from GROW, a puzzle series by Japanese indie developer On Nakayama, and its core rule was simple: place three matching objects next to each other and they combine into one upgraded object; three bushes become a tree, three trees become a hut.[3] That single rule is the ancestor of every merge chain in every merge game since.
A few years later, in 2014, Threes! turned a similar combining idea into a sliding number puzzle.[4] Its success spawned a free clone called 1024, which was in turn cloned by a developer named Gabriele Cirulli into 2048, the version that actually went viral. Threes' creators were candid about how it stung to watch a free clone of a clone eclipse the paid original; Cirulli himself later said he understood their frustration and felt bad that 2048's popularity had hurt their game.[5] Whatever you call the lineage, "combine two matching tiles into the next number" became something almost everyone with a phone had tried at least once.
Merge games as their own genre really took off with Merge Dragons!. It actually started as a solo project by developer Ray Mazza in 2016, before the studio Gram Games acquired it, brought Mazza on as creative director, and relaunched it in June 2017 as Gram Games' first game built around in-app purchases.[6] The relaunch took the Triple Town formula and added goals, timers, and a lot more stuff to collect and build, much closer to what a merge game feels like today. It was a big enough hit that Zynga bought Gram Games outright less than a year later, in 2018, for $250 million.[7] That success opened the door for the wave of merge games that followed: Merge Mansion, Merge Magic, Township-style production chains, and eventually games like Travel Town, which you're here playing right now.
⚡ References
- Lo, Andrew. "The Game of Leaves: An Inquiry into the Origin of Chinese Playing Cards." Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, vol. 63, no. 3, 2000, p. 401.
- National Geographic: "Why Mahjong Is a Global Phenomenon", citing historian Annelise Heinz, author of Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture (Oxford University Press).
- Game World Observer: "How Spry Fox Pioneered the Merge Genre with Triple Town"
- Juul, Jesper. "Where Did Threes Come From? A History." The Ludologist
- TechCrunch: "Clones, Clones Everywhere" and Kotaku: "2048's Massive Popularity Triggers Cloning Controversy"
- PocketGamer.biz: "Gram Games Launches First IAP-Driven Title Merge Dragons!" and Ray Mazza's official portfolio site
- Zynga: "Zynga Acquires Leading Global Mobile Game Developer Gram Games" (official announcement, May 30, 2018)