From a left-field acquisition to an accidental five-letter controversy, the NewYorkTimes gives us a behind-the-scenes look into Wordle's big year.
This story is part of our 2022 in Gaming series. Follow along as we reflect on the year's best titles. If you logged onto Twitter exactly one year ago, you can probably recall the moment you began to see your feed fill up with gray, yellow, and green boxes. Though it launched in 2021 and gained mainstream popularity in December of that year, Wordle became a sudden cultural phenomenon in early 2022 that was inescapable outside of a muted words list.
The internet’s game For The New York Times, the whirlwind Wordle acquisition was a no-brainer. From the jump, the publication felt the game already had the look and feel of one of its own games, down to its modest aesthetic. The $3 million deal came together quickly to capitalize on its growing success, but the Games team was just as anxious about ruining a good thing as its players were.
While that philosophy would guide Wordle through its first year under The New York Times’ banner, the team wouldn’t close itself off to changes entirely. In fact, Knight notes that the team did consider making some changes and hasn’t ruled out the possibility of doing so down the line to keep it fresh.
The most significant change came when The New York Times’ Tracy Bennett became Wordle’s official editor, overseeing what was previously a preprogrammed list of words creator Josh Wardle had put together. To an outsider, the idea of an editor monitoring a game that features one five-letter word a day might sound silly. But the New York Times quickly found that it was a necessary step when dealing with a cultural phenomenon.
“That was a moment in time where we had not yet integrated it into our back end,” Knight says. “We weren’t technically able to change the answer on a dime. Fetus had been programmed almost a year earlier on that particular day. We had a programmer who flagged, ‘Hey everybody, in two days the answer is going to be fetus,’ and that was two days after the leaked Roe v. Wade decision had made headlines.
That success has rubbed off on The New York Times’ other offerings. Knight notes that Spelling Bee in particular has seen growth thanks to Wordle, with the word game landing 77 million “geniuses” in 2022. While Wordle may be a hot topic for players, it’s only one piece of a larger institution that Knight has ambitious plans for.
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