Wordle Has Been Ported To Nintendo Game Boy | Screen Rant
An impressive coder ported Wordle to the Nintendo Game Boy and the Analogue Pocket, introducing a new way to guess the five-letter answer.
Josh Wardle’s viral word game Wordle has been ported to the Nintendo Game Boy and the Analogue Pocket, introducing a new way to guess the daily five-letter answer. Wordle has taken the world by storm through its simplistic gameplay design and viral sharing features. Though The New York Times has changed Wordle in a variety of ways, the game has maintained its popularity, with players continuously attempting to guess the daily answer in six tries.
Wordle’s New York Times acquisition didn’t change the core gameplay experience, though there were a few new features added and a slight aesthetic tweak after the game jumped to the newspaper’s website. A new High Contrast Mode changes the green boxes to orange and yellow boxes to blue, and The New York Times also removed offensive words after Wordle’s acquisition. The game’s font has also changed to match the newspaper’s house style, and the daily answers are different than the program originally slated them to be. Though there hasn’t been any move to monetize Wordle, there is still a possibility that the newspaper will move the game to its game subscription service. Before that day comes, however, some programmers have been hard at work making their own Wordle games.
Twitter user stacksmashing (via VG247) got Wordle to run on the Nintendo Game Boy. The ROM works for both the original Game Boy and the Analogue Pocket, a retro handheld device that offers hardware support for Game Boy and Game Boy Advanced games. The project was inspired by Twitter user bobberto1995’s, who ported Wordle to PalmOS for use on the Palm VII. Stacksmashing’s Saturday project does have its limitations due to the small ROM size. The coder “couldn’t fit in a big wordlist of ‘real’ words” and instead used a bloom filter to check whether an entered word is “one of the 8000 most common English words.” The programmer admitted that there is a very high error rate, though the ROM now allows Game Boy and even Super Game Boy 2 owners to try Wordle in its retro refit.
Having sold over 120 million units in its lifetime, Game Boy is one of the most popular consoles in history and it seems its legacy is still strong. Programmers continue to port modern games on the old device. For example, Sebastian Staacks played GTA 5 on an original Game Boy by using a modded game cartridge. This trend has given the Nintendo console a new life in the modern gaming era.
Considering Wordle’s massive success yet simplistic gameplay design, it’s no surprise that someone figured out how to port it to the Game Boy. Before it was acquired by The New York Times, it was discovered that Wordle answers were planned over a year in advance, which means it didn’t rely on a constant connection to a server to update daily. This would mean a port on most old devices is possible with the right coding, and the Game Boy is the ideal console given Wordle’s mobile roots. Beyond potential Wordle ports, there has also been a trend of creating unique versions of the viral word game, with an impressive line-up available, inluding Lordle of the Rings and Worldle, the aptly named Geography-based Wordle clone.
Source: stacksmashing/Twitter (via VG247)