🟩 🟩 🟨 🟩 🟨 : New York Times Games Brings Wordle to Meta Quest

Wordle has been captivating players around the globe for the last three years, attracting a massive audience and tapping into our collective competitive streak. The game is simple, yet satisfying: Guess a five-letter word in six tries or less and you win, with a new puzzle released daily. And now, New York Times Games is opening up the wonderful world of Wordle to a new audience with the launch of a dedicated 2D panel app on Meta Quest 2, 3, and Pro.

We sat down with General Manager of NYT Games Jonathan Knight to learn more about the legacy of games at the New York Times and celebrate today’s launch.

Jonathan Knight: I joined The Times in 2020 as the General Manager of Games, leading the team as we build new puzzles and scale our wider portfolio of thoughtful and enjoyable games. I’ve been in the gaming industry for over 20 years and have worked across console, PC, and mobile. I’ve previously led products like Words With Friends, Farmville, and The Sims 2 and helped bring properties like Harry Potter and The Simpsons into the interactive medium.

I’ve had a lifelong passion for games—my father collected board games, and with my two brothers, we played the usual classics like Risk and Monopoly and various deeper strategy and war games like Civilization and Sea Strike. I grew up on computer games and learned to code my own games from an early age. I studied both theater and computer science, and after graduate school, I jumped at a production opportunity in the growing games industry.

Gaming has made for an incredibly fulfilling career path, and I love blending the creative work of game development with product rigor and data analytics. And it’s what The Times does best—an intense focus on quality content, while delivering best-in-class product experiences.

Games have been an important feature of The Times since 1942 when we ran the first New York Times Crossword puzzle. The puzzle went digital alongside the news with the 1996 website launch, and as mobile games exploded and smartphones became more ubiquitous, The Times launched our Crossword app in 2014 (and subsequently launched a variety of new games on both mobile and web). Games is an essential part of The Times portfolio as it provides daily fun to our solvers’ day and creates pathways for players to engage with our other Times products across the bundle (News, Cooking, The Athletic, and Wirecutter).

JK: There is no typical day on New York Times Games, which is part of the joy of the job. I’m usually cycling through people, product, and process. We have an incredible team across a variety of disciplines, and I spend a lot of time helping ensure we have the right priorities and the right resources in place to hit our goals.

In terms of developing new games, we have regular touchpoints as a team to explore new ideas, including our annual Game Jam, which is our version of a hackathon where anyone on the Games team can pitch a Games idea. Each pitch is assessed against our greenlight process and, if approved, goes through rounds of creative iteration, usability testing, and workshops. Our team of puzzle designers, editors, engineers, producers, analysts, and researchers work together to shape each new game or feature. Not all ideas are greenlit, but it’s a collaborative process that our whole team can be part of.

On a day to day basis, I also oversee the testing of new features and updates for our existing games, analyzing audience engagement and test results, improving our New York Times Games app, and collaborating with other missions across the company to advance the Games strategy and vision.

JK: In January of 2022, The Times wrote a story about Wordle and how it was growing virally and captivating audiences globally. I can attest to its stickiness, as it quickly became part of my own daily routine. Wordle reminded us of our own Times puzzles: classic one-a-day word-guessing games, with a clean, elegant UI, and a human-made puzzle that everyone is trying to solve together. It felt like a natural fit. We reached out to the creator, Josh Wardle, and announced the acquisition of the game a few weeks later. It’s been over two years now, and we’re thrilled to have Wordle as part of our portfolio. Wordle has brought a large and passionate audience of tens of millions each week, many of whom have come to love our other Times games and products.

JK: I usually alternate between STARE and RAISE. The most common starting word among the Wordle audience at large is ADIEU.

JK: We’re always looking for unique and creative opportunities to reach audiences with our games. This collaboration reflects our embrace of innovative technologies and exploration of new formats and experiences, like mixed reality, to bring our games to life. Wordle is the perfect choice for this virtual environment, given its simple, user-friendly interface that audiences everywhere have come to love.

JK: Wherever there are new emerging platforms, you will always find games. I really believe that we are all gamers and that the need for play is fundamental to human nature. Games have the power to unite and bring people together. We’re excited to explore new formats that can bring to life New York Times Games, like Wordle, and allow even more people to play and enjoy in unique and creative ways.

JK: The Wordle 2D Panel app for Quest is a focused version of the Wordle experience designed specifically for Quest and mixed reality. All solvers with a Quest 2, 3, or Pro headset can play Wordle in this unique virtual environment and make their gameplay three-dimensional and even more interactive.

JK: We have a lot of exciting updates coming this fall from New York Times Games—stay tuned! We just announced stats and streaks for Connections, as well as the all-new ConnectionsBot.

JK: New York Times Games has provided engaging word and logic games, captivating solvers since the launch of The Crossword in 1942 and continuing with The Mini Crossword, Spelling Bee, Letter Boxed, Tiles, Vertex, Sudoku, Wordle, Connections, and our newest game, Strands. In 2024, we rolled out a redesigned Games app, positioning The Times as a destination for a variety and breadth of games.

In 2023, our puzzles were played more than 8 billion times including The Mini Crossword, which was played more than 1 billion times. Wordle was played 4.8 billion times. Spelling Bee players reached Genius more than 120 million times, and 2.3 billion successful Connections have been made. The NYT Games app was downloaded 10 million times in 2023. As of Q4 2023, Connections has over 15 million weekly players.

Come be part of the New York Times Games community and play daily puzzles on our New York Times Games app, the play tab of our New York Times app, and on mobile and web.