A Twitter user has revealed the easy way you can continue playing Wordle for free if the New York Times decides to keep your happy place behind a paywall.
The word puzzle game’s creator Josh Wardle on Tuesday sold the game to The New York Times for a cheeky price “in the low seven figures”.
“I am incredibly pleased to announce that I’ve reached an agreement with The New York Times for them to take over running Wordle going forward,” he said in an announcement post on Tuesday.
“If you’ve followed along with the story of Wordle, you’ll know that NYT games play a big part in its origins and so this step feels very natural to me.”
The sale was a great win for indie creators around the world but left many fans of the game worried that they’d soon have to pay to play the currently free-to-play game.
The NYT promised Wordle will “initially remain free to new and existing players” which suggests that it’ll eventually be behind a paywall.
But there’s a simple way to get around that should it happen.
Twitter user Aaron Rieke explained on Wednesday that you can mirror an earlier version of the Wordle website. You can access these via the Internet Archive.
“Even if we all played on different ‘mirror’ sites, we’d still be playing the same words at the same time,” he clarified.
“We’d continue to share the same experience. We’d even accrue our own states (on a per-site basis).”
Or, you can go to any “mirror” of the original Wordle website and play there.
For example, here’s the Internet Archive’s versions, which will work for a long time: https://t.co/HyodXGbVQU
3/x
— Aaron Rieke (@aaronkbr) February 1, 2022
You can also save a copy of the website and disconnect your computer from the internet but who wants to cut themselves off from the dark wide web? Not me, baby, I’m shackled to the chains of the doomscroll.
Other Wordle stans in Rieke’s replies mentioned that you could possibly edit the code to add your own word. Someone somewhere is reading that last sentence and already planning to propose to their significant other via the daily word app.
https://twitter.com/ThinkingYid/status/1488727799183687680
If you can’t stop playing the soothing square game, a computer scientist figured out the best guess to start with and no, it’s not adieu.
