The New Yorker:

Josh Wardle designed one of the most popular word games of our time. Now he wants to mainstream one of the most difficult ones.

By Simon Parkin

The day Josh Wardle sold Wordle to the New York Times, in 2022, for more than a million dollars, should have been a moment of triumph. The game, which gives players six chances to guess a five-letter word, had unexpectedly become a global sensation, and Wardle had already begun to receive e-mails from puzzle designers seeking his input on their own ideas. “The underlying question was always, ‘How do I sell this to the New York Times?’ ” he told me. In their eyes, Wardle had achieved the ultimate success. Yet, as he fielded invitations from journalists, chat-show hosts, and podcast producers, Wardle felt only discombobulated, even borderline depressed.

The problem was not only the speed with which fame had upended his life but the fact that it had arrived uninvited. Wardle, who grew up on a farm in Wales, and who recently returned to the U.K. from Brooklyn, had built the game as a gift for his partner, Palak Shah: a bonding ritual they could share each evening. At the time, he didn’t consider himself a game designer, though play was deeply embedded in his professional life. While working as a product manager for Reddit, he had created a series of interactive projects for April Fools’ Day. One of them, from 2015, was the Button, a web page featuring a large button and a sixty-second countdown clock. Each time a visitor clicked the button, it reset the timer; if no one pressed it before the clock reached zero, the project would end. More than a million people participated before the countdown finally expired, three months later.

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