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Long read: The beauty and drama of video games and their clouds

"It's a little bit hard to work out without knowing the altitude of that dragon..."

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Over three years later, someone beat Threes!

It's the magic number.

While I love numbers-based puzzle game Threes!, I'm not particularly good at it. But there are plenty of people out there who are good at it - and someone has finally managed to beat it - over three years after the game came out.

The ThreesPorn Twitter account, which represents a group of high-level Threes! superfans based in San Francisco, revealed one of its players, who signs the Threes! leaderboard as "Gideon", managed to hit a big enough score that triggered a game over.

The fact you can "beat" Threes! comes as something of a surprise. Most players had considered it to be an endless numbers puzzle game. I certainly thought that the numbers would just go up and up and up as you combined bigger and bigger tiles until, well, inevitable death.

THERE MAY BE SPOILERS AHEAD!

It turns out that not only can you beat Threes!, but when you do so you get a nicely-animated ending. Lovely!

Here's the story of the winning game, in tweets, that culminated with two 6144 giants combining to trigger the on-screen celebration. The high score: a whopping 1,594,458. Dreamland!

Threes! creators Asher Vollmer and Greg Wohlwend expressed their excitement that finally, someone had discovered their secret. Wohlwent took to Twitter to say it took 3.33 years for someone to beat Threes! What a coincidence!

So there it is. Threes! is done and dusted. I won't be going back to play again. No, sir.