It’s funny to think about names. If circumstances were just a tiny bit different, Chuck Spadina could have been up on stage winning over E3 by telling it how breathtaking it is; we might have all have been round the arcade giggling at a Kong Dong cabinet; or perhaps sitting down over breakfast for a quick game of Mr Bugs Wordys Nugz.
That’s the unlikely title developer Josh Wardle once considered for his daily word game phenomenon Wordle before settling on the one that’s since become a household name. “Had I called the game Mr. Bugs,” Wardle admitted to an audience at the recent Figma Config conference, “I like to think it would not have been successful.”
Wardle was speaking during a presentation detailing Wordle’s long development (thanks The Verge), revealing some of decisions he’d made along the way. That journey began in 2013 when, while trying to make something that might appeal to his partner, he mashed together words and Mastermind to make an Android game. Perhaps surprisingly, the core of Wordle was there right from the start, giving players six turns to guess a five-letter word.
There were detours and deviations along the way, however. One prototype shown during Wardle’s presentation was endless in design, quickly following one word with another, while a second attempt to refine Wordle’s essence introduced lives. Nothing quite clicked, and eventually Wardle lost interest, putting the game “on the back burner” for six years. It wasn’t until he started regularly playing New York Times games like Spelling Bee in 2020 that an idea struck and, returning to Wordle the following year, he built a version inspired by their once-a-day design.