Josh Wardle, creator of Wordle.

My guest today is a software engineer who, in 2021, released a word game that soon became a global obsession. He grew up in a Welsh farming village, attended the Royal Holloway University, then moved to North America to study for a Masters. In 2011, after graduating, he joined the staff of the website Reddit, where he began to design experimental games such as The Button, Place and, in his spare time, a game called Wordle. Several years later he returned to the Wordle prototype, which he finished and uploaded to his personal website in October 2021. Within a month the game had 90 players. Within two, it had 300,000. A week after that, it was being played by two million people, and had caught the attention of the New York Times, which in January 2022, acquired the game for a seven-figure sum. Play the console: Super Mario WorldQuake IIThe WitnessPUBG: BattlegroundsNew York Times crossword Thank you for listening to My Perfect Console. Please consider becoming a Patreon supporter; your small monthly subscription will help to make the podcast sustainable for the long term, and you'll receive bonus content, and access to the My Perfect Console community: https://www.patreon.com/myperfectconsole Be attitude for gains. https://plus.acast.com/s/my-perfect-console. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.