Posted in: Comics, Marvel Comics | Tagged: captain america, marvel, Wordle

Marvel Comics Wonders If Today's Wordle Could Be "Bucky"?

Published Wed, 12 Jan 2022 13:42:09 -0600

It's Wordle time! This scene from Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting's Captain America/Winter Soldier comic book run has become rather meme-tastic over the years.

Especially after the scene was reprised in the Captain America: The Winter Soldier movie.

Well, today, Marvel Comics decided to add to those memes to something else folk are talking about, the online game Wordle. Like some algorithm mashed the two up, automatically. With the Marvel Twitter account tweeting the following image without additional text.

After all, Bucky is a five-letter word, isn't it? Hint, today's Wordle word is not Bucky.

Wordle is an online word game developed by Josh Wardle, a programmer who had previously created the social experiments Place and The Button for Reddit. Every day, a five-letter word is chosen that players aim to guess within six tries. After each guess, the letters are either marked as green, yellow, or grey; green means that the letter is correct and in the correct position, yellow means that the letter is in the answer but not in the right position, and grey means the letter is not in the answer at all. The game also gives people a coloured grid for the day showing their success – or not -without spoiling the word. Although I am annoyed that, despite being a game of British origin, we now know it prefers Americanised English. The game became a viral phenomenon on Twitter in late December 2021, after Wardle added a sharing element to the game, letting users copy their results in the form of a grid of coloured square emoji. On the 1st of November 2021, 90 people played that day. On the 2nd of January 2022, that was now 300,000. A week later? Two million, and rising.

Following the game's sudden rise in popularity at the start of 2022, a number of video game clones appeared that changed the game a little. But on Apple's App Store, a number of ad-supported clones which did little to alter the formula, even borrowing the game's name, appeared in early January 2022. One developer of the clones had bragged about their success on social media, leading numerous other users to ridicule him for creating a clone, causing the developer to set their social media accounts to private. Users continued to seek out other Wordle clones on the App Store, and by the end of that day, nearly all of the clones had been removed from the store, though Apple did not confirm if it was responsible for their removal.