Whether it’s Snake, Pinball or Fortnite, most of us have played around with free games
But the latest internet craze just puts you against 6 guesses and 26 letters and has already
been played by millions around the world But what exactly is Wordle?
Why was the game acquired by the New York Times?
And how can you download Wordle to keep playing forever?
Here’s How It Happened.
Most people don’t realise that Wordle wasn’t the founder’s first viral internet sensation.
After growing up in Wales in the UK, and studying in both the UK and the US,
creator Josh Wardle became a product manager at social discussion site Reddit.
It was in that role that he helped launch experimental games like The Button,
which attracted clicks from over a million users, and Place, a 16 million tile canvas
that users could change one pixel at a time to reflect a cross section of the internet.
Then in 2021, while Josh continued to work as a software engineer, he quietly
released his spelling game, Wordle.
The aim of the game is to guess a 5 letter word; users have six attempts, and after each try get
feedback on how many letters they guessed correctly, and how many were also in the
correct position, shown by a yellow or green square. Similar in strategy to games like
Mastermind and Battleships, the result of each guess can help improve your next one,
and there is only one solution per day, with no ads or paywalls in sight.
So what makes the game so popular?
Wordle was only launched in October, with a title similar to Josh Wardle’s last name,
who designed it to keep his wife entertained while she was stuck at home during the pandemic.
After receiving positive reviews from family members, the game started to gather momentum in
the following weeks, going viral as soon as Josh added the emoji feature in December that enabled
users to colourfully share their results with friends, an addition that took Twitter by storm.
From just 90 players on the first of November, Wordle’s user base
skyrocketed to 300,000 at the start of 2022, and hitting 2 million players by mid-January.
The game received rave reviews from some of the world’s top newspapers,
including the New York Times, and the array of grey, yellow and green boxes has become
common theme on news feeds and timelines.
Josh has suggested that the availability of just one puzzle per day helps build excitement by the
game’s scarcity, plus the fact that players can’t binge Wordle means it’s hard to get bored of it.
The game is free to play and is best found by just Googling Wordle and hitting the top link.
And while there’s currently no app version, confusion arose when Wordle! with an exclamation
point flew up the download charts in early January. In fact this version had already been
around for 5 years, and after its creator Steven Cravotta spoke with Josh, he decided to donate
every dollar he’d made that month to a charity that tutors and mentors students in California
Unfortunately not everyone has been as admirable as Cravotta, with fraudulent
knock-offs appearing in the app store that hope to make a quick buck from Wordle fanatics.
By the 31st of January, Wordle was just too popular for any company to ignore,
and the New York Times announced the acquisition of the game for
an undisclosed figure in the low 7 figures, basically a few million dollars.
Their intention is to add Wordle to their current portfolio of word games like The Crossword and
Spelling Bee. The Times’ Games subscription is charged at $40 per year, for which they already
have over a million paying subscribers, and although the Newspaper insists that Wordle will
remain free to play for now, there are fears that one day it could become exclusively for members.
To combat the possibility of paying for the addictive game, players have discovered that
since Wordle is played entirely in your browser, it can be downloaded by right clicking on desktop
and choosing Save As. The same can even be done on Android by tapping the download button,
and on iOS by choosing Share, Options, Web Archive and Save to Files.
Then you can keep playing Wordle while you’re offline,
with a solution that changes every day based on the date in your device.
Although the choice of settings on the official site is fairly basic, third parties have created
their own variations like absurdle, which changes the solution with each guess, and Nerdle, which
uses numbers instead of letters, not to mention a reported range of 100 different languages for
players to enjoy all around the world. Let us know what you think of Wordle.
What’s your best score And what’s your favourite ever free game
That’s How It Happened. And thanks for watching.