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’t quite as catchy. “This is true: I was going to call ,” Wardle revealed as part of a presentation about at Figma’s Config conference on Wednesday.
He also showed a slide that spelled out the name in big yellow letters. “Had I called the game , I like to think it would not have been successful.” During the presentation, which the development decisions that he said “are the opposite of what you’re meant to do” 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 . He liked words and liked the game , so in 2013, he mashed the two ideas together and started making what would become . 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 “ ” or “ .” In order to whittle down the word list to a set of words that “people could reasonably know,” Wardle then built another game where you could press a button to say if you knew a word, didn’t know it, or maybe knew it.
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