Wordle Archive, the popular repository for retired Wordle puzzles, has been shut down after a request from The New York Times.
Created in January by computational biologist Devang Thakkar, Wordle Archive enabled errant players of the daily word game to complete previous puzzles they had either missed or failed. The Archive proved hugely popular, receiving 100,000 visitors a day within a couple of weeks of launch.
Now, though, the archive has been removed at the behest of the New York Times, which bought Wordle from its original creator Josh Wardle for an undisclosed seven-figure sum at the beginning of this year. In a statement posted on his website, Thakkar said, “It has been a fun three months since I launched this archive and it brought joy to a lot of us but all good things must end—to be honest, I was wondering what took them so long.”
This isn’t the first Wordle Archive to suffer such a fate. Back in March, a Wordle Archive run by freelance website and app developer Metzger-Media shuttered after receiving an offer it couldn’t refuse, with the company’s owner Noah stating on the archive site “the New York Times has requested that the Wordle Archive be taken down.”
In both cases, The Times’ request is unsurprising. One of the big draws of Wordle is that it is a daily event. You get 24 hours to solve the conundrum on offer, and if you fail or forget, then it’s tough thesauruses—you have to move on to the next puzzle. Having a huge archive of existing Wordle puzzles is somewhat counter to the spirit of the game, even if there’s no real harm in it. It’s also likely that both archives were treading on some legal toes.
Although Wordle Achive may have gone to the great dictionary in the sky, there are still plenty of other ways to get your puzzling fix. Check out PC Gamer’s extensive list of Wordle-alikes, which includes the math-based Nerdle, the geography oriented Worldle, and the multiplayer Squabble. I still can’t believe nobody’s done a cheese-based guessing game called Curdle. Time to cash in!
