The Love Story Behind Wordle: How a Gift Became a Global Phenomenon
Josh Wardle is a Welsh software engineer. Once to make her girlfriend happy and bring a smile to her face, Josh created a customized game specially for her because she was just in love with word games.
He built the game with a simple concept. The user gets six chances to figure out a five-letter word. Each guess provides the user with clues indicating whether their chosen word is correct or incorrect. For that purpose, there are three supportive colors.
The green color indicates that the correct letter is perfectly positioned. However, the yellow color shows that the letter is in the wrong position even though it is correct. You have to bring it to the right spot by using your mind and experience within six attempts. But if you see the gray color, it means you have to leave that letter because it doesn’t exist in the word at all.
Josh chose the first puzzle word “CIGAR’ and the game is named after Josh’s own name.
After creating the game, he showed it first to his family. But later on, he presented in front of his friends, and they joined him. In 2021, noticing her friends’ interest and punctuality in the game, Josh decided to launch the game publicly.
Initially, he launched it on a simple website, and only a few players regularly played the game. However, later on, some players discovered a unique yet interesting aspect of the game. They realized that they could share their game answers in those color grids, without ruining others’ game experience.
Soon, Twitter was full of these colorful grids. The fact that everyone got just one puzzle per day made this game even more exciting. Within three months, millions of people were hooked on Wordle.
The New York Times was having a keen eye on what was happening. So, they purchased the Wordle game in early 2022 for more than a million dollars. They promised players it would stay free.
The Times added Wordle to its collection of games. They brought in experts to carefully select the daily words. They even built WordleBot, which is a tool that reviews the user’s strategies.
