The Recent York Times is betting that the Wordle craze isn’t over yet. On Monday, the Times announced that it will be turning the hit mobile word game right into a televised game show on NBC.
“Today” show anchor Savannah Guthrie will host the affair, while The Times and “The Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon will each function production partners. Guthrie and Fallon announced the news on the 8:00 a.m. broadcast of the “Today” show on Monday, where they shared that the sport show had been in development for the past two and a half years.
The show, which is able to begin airing on NBC next yr, is being described as “fast-paced” and a “great family game.” That sounds a bit different from the mobile game, which frequently requires long periods of thought where users work through the choices.
This will likely be the primary time that The Times has collaborated with a TV broadcaster for an entertainment-based program, representing yet one more pivot within the media company’s try and construct a sustainable digital subscription business as print revenue continues to say no.
Wordle began its life as a preferred online word puzzle game after being released in October 2021 by Josh Wardle, a software engineer in Brooklyn. In January of the next yr, The NYT acquired the title for its growing games business, almost immediately bringing “tens of hundreds of thousands” of recent users to the Recent York Times. As of last yr, NYT Games says that users played greater than 11 billion puzzles across all its games over the course of the yr, up from 8 billion in 2023.
NBC will start shooting episodes of the sport show this summer and is currently searching for contestants.