Wordle creator describes game’s rise, says NYT sale was “a way to walk away”

Jony Ive would talk about the fragility of ideas. I didn’t realize that Wardle started the idea for Wordle years ago, and let it sit and stew for a few years and came back to it and refined it further.

However, the most interesting new thing I learned was that he built custom tooling to curate the word list. Along with the single word per day and the shareable block emoji (which wasn’t his idea), I think the curation was central to its success.