Wordle<\/em> is a pretty clever name for the very good word game created by Josh Wardle. But when he was first working on it in 2013, Wardle had another name in mind that isn\u2019t quite as catchy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThis is true: I was going to call Wordle,<\/em> Mr. Bugs\u2019 Wordy Nugz<\/em>,\u201d Wardle revealed as part of a presentation about Wordle<\/em> at Figma\u2019s Config conference on Wednesday. He also showed a slide that spelled out the name in big yellow letters. \u201cHad I called the game Mr. Bugs<\/em>, I like to think it would not have been successful.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n During the presentation, which was about<\/a> the development decisions that he said \u201care the opposite of what you\u2019re meant to do\u201d but ultimately contributed to making the game a hit, Wardle also discussed the history of the game and showed off a bunch of early prototypes. Wardle had wanted to make a game for his partner<\/a>. He liked words and liked the game Mastermind<\/em>, so in 2013, he mashed the two ideas together and started making what would become Wordle<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n His first prototype was for Android, and much of the core game was there: you had six guesses to figure out a five-letter word. But this early version was an endless game, meaning that as soon as you figured out one word, you could try and solve another. It also picked from five-letter words at random, meaning you might have been trying to figure out more obscure words like \u201czizel<\/a>\u201d or \u201cyrneh<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Screenshot by Jay Peters \/ The Verge<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In order to whittle down the word list to a set of words that \u201cpeople could reasonably know,\u201d Wardle then built another game where you could press a button to say if you knew a word, didn\u2019t know it, or maybe knew it. This helped him winnow the list down from 13,000 to about 2,500 words. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n He also kept working on the game\u2019s design. In some older iterations he included with his presentation, the game had things like a score or red X marks to denote \u201clives.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Screenshot by Jay Peters \/ The Verge<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Screenshot by Jay Peters \/ The Verge<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n This all happened in 2013, when he was also considering the Mr. Bugs<\/em> name. But then, Wardle said he lost interest in the game, \u201cput it on the back burner,\u201d and didn\u2019t touch it for six years. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n In early 2020, Wardle and his partner were playing a lot of The New York Times<\/em>\u2019 crossword and its Spelling Bee<\/em> game. He noticed that they were both once-a-day kind of games \u2014\u00a0there is only one Spelling Bee <\/em>a day, <\/em>and the day\u2019s crossword must be completed on the same day in order to maintain a streak. He decided to make a similar choice for what would become Wordle<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In 2021, he built a version of what would become Wordle<\/em> that lived on his personal domain (which is where you might have played Wordle<\/em><\/a> before The New York Times<\/em> fully took it over).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThis was something else I did that you\u2019re not meant to do. I made a website,\u201d Wardle said. \u201cI think a lot of the thinking around games was that you want apps so you can catch your audience. You can send them push notifications. I didn\u2019t want to do any of that. It was just [my partner] and I playing the game. So making a website seemed so obvious to me.\u201d He thinks being a website helped the game, as you could just share it with someone and they could play it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n For about six months, Wardle said it was just the two of them playing the game on his website. Then, he shared it with family, they shared it with friends, and it started to grow from there. After seeing people post their results in emoji form, he formally added emoji results<\/a> as a feature to the game in late 2021.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n