Unless you haven’t had access to the internet over the past few months, you’ve most likely noticed that a web-based game called Wordle has taken over social media.
In Wordle, each player has six attempts to guess a five-letter word each day. The tiles become yellow if a letter is correct but not in the right place and green if it’s where it should be. This simple but addictive game has found so much success that The New York Times bought it on Jan. 31 for a seven-figure fee.
Given that Wordle is perfectly designed for handheld devices, it didn’t take long for someone to make a port to the Nintendo Game Boy, one of the most beloved handheld game consoles of all time. Stacksmashing, an IT security researcher, announced on Twitter on Feb. 6 that he made Wordle work on his Game Boy and made the ROM available to everyone who wants to try it.
The port, though, comes with some limitations, according to stacksmashing. “The ROM size is very limited, so I couldn’t fit in a big wordlist of ‘real’ words,” the hacker said. “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.”
If you’re interested in trying Wordle on a Game Boy, you can download the ROM here. If you don’t own a Game Boy, there’s even a way to try stacksmashing’s version of Wordle online—and it works on mobile.
