If Worlde was around in the 1990s, it probably would have launched on the one console that was truly popular with adults—the Game Boy. And although we can’t go back in time and pitch the game to Nintendo, we can now play Wordle on our old Game Boys thanks to a port from stacksmashing.
The Game Boy Wordle port is true to form and works on old hardware, Game Boy emulators, and the Analogue Pocket. But it’s a bit rudimentary, without a proper title screen or method to restart games (without restarting the console, that is).
WORDLE is now running on the Game Boy! pic.twitter.com/Zk8aDr7MST
— stacksmashing (@ghidraninja) February 6, 2022
A nerdy detail: The ROM size is very limited, so I couldn’t fit in a big wordlist of “real” words. Instead I’m using a bloom filter to check (with, admittedly, currently a very high error-rate) whether an entered word is one of the 8000 most common English words
And as stacksmashing notes, the port doesn’t have a proper dictionary due to hardware constraints. Instead, it chooses words using a bloom filter, which can lead to some odd results. (After playing a few games, one of the winning words was “Rentt.”)
Stacksmashing says that this project was inspired by /u/bobberto1995’s Wordle port for Palm Pilot devices. That said, as far as we know, the first retro Wordle port was for the legendary BBC Micro.
You can find the Worlde Game Boy ROM or Analogue Pocket ROM at stacksmashing’s GitHub, or simply try it in the browser. If you’d like, you can also check stacksmashing’s code for the game.
Source: stacksmashing via Gizmodo
