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Comment by LeonM | Hacker News Reader

After reading this post I googled to see what Wordle is.

I immediately recognized Wordle as a clone of 'Lingo' [0], a popular TV game show that started somewhere in the 80's, and is still broadcasted today. It's very popular here in the Netherlands.

> But I can't help but feel that the guy is about to let someone else benefit from his creation and am not sure how to feel about that

I'm not sure how the creators of Lingo must feel about this Josh Wardle getting credit for 'creating' a game that they have been broadcasting for over 40 years.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingo_(Dutch_game_show)

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But again Lingo is a variation on something like the peg game Mastermind.

He could have slightly tweaked the game to not be like Lingo.

But it's in a bit of an impossible spot now. A Lingo buy out could be a solution.

Anyway there's about a million Englishman ready to kneecap him unless he does i18n. ;)

Lingo was not the first but it doesn't matter. Wordle is not popular because it's a copy of an ancient game that had been played as long as language has existed. It's popular because of its execution, tapping in to our current day and age (shared word once a day, easy emoji sharing).

Sharing doesn't work in Firefox for me.

Works on Firefox for me, in boring old Ubuntu. Maybe font issues?

I've noticed that the emojis look like question marks in some clients (Slack etc) but renders fine when you actually post them.

This happens because Slack, Twitter, ... replace emojis with pictures.

This has been fixed!

Its basically the "word mastermind" boardgame from the 1970s with 5 letters instead of 4. Not that I think that matters.

It does seem like everything has been invented! It's possible that he arrived at the puzzle independently but what's more puzzling that this is the first time I'm hearing about this Dutch game show given the sensation that Wordle has been.

Not saying that you need to read every comment, but pretty much every "Wordle" post here has someone commenting that Lingo was the original.

And the "Dutch game show" was just an international version of the US original[0]. It's run in 16 countries and is presently airing in 5.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingo_(American_game_show)

'Lingo' has teams drawing balls of different colours and competing head to head. It is not 'clone'. There are dozens of similar word games in various cultures with similar concepts of giving information about the presence of a letter and position of a letter in the word. Your response is a classical cynical mindset of a jealous person.

The question was about monetization, not about your engineer syndrome.

Questioning the novelty of a letter based game sounds perfectly reasonable to me and does not call for any sort of insults.

It certainly happens frequently that a new game idea is stolen to make money in some app store, but it also actually often happens that a seemingly inovative new game was actually not that new to begin with.

Everything is a remix of other things that look like it. In this case it's the fact that everyone has the same word every day and you can compare how well you did that made it go viral.

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