Before Wordle: DEC’s 1973 BASIC “WORD” and the Roots of Guessing Games

A Wordle-like game, WORD, was published by DEC in 1973, predating Lingo and modern Wordle by decades. The article traces WORD’s lineage through a vibrant ecosystem of early BASIC guessing games that thrived due to their simplicity and hardware-friendly design. It concludes that these classics are still playable and ripe for contemporary revival.

Key Points

• A Wordle-like game called WORD was published in 1973 by DEC; it mirrors Wordle’s letter/position feedback, was authored by Charles Reid, had only 12 words, and is now public domain and playable online.
• Guessing games flourished in early BASIC because their hidden-information-plus-clue loops were easy to implement on limited hardware.
• The foundational GUESS (Walt Koetke) inspired many successors; Dennis Allison’s 1975 call to “Build Your Own BASIC” prominently featured such guessing games.
• The genre included many variants—HI-LO, NUMBER, STARS, TRAP, BAGELS, LETTER, HURKLE, MUGWMP, and combat-themed titles like TARGET—spanning numeric, grid, and strategy twists.
• Reverse guessing games (e.g., ANIMAL, SALVO, DIGITS, NICOMA) were harder due to knowledge and memory constraints, but examples existed and are also playable in-browser today.

Sentiment

The community is broadly appreciative of the historical exploration but collectively pushes the lineage even further back than the article does. The tone is warm, nostalgic, and collaborative rather than dismissive, with commenters enriching rather than attacking the article's thesis. There is gentle consensus that Wordle's viral success owes more to timing and social design than to gameplay innovation.

In Agreement

• The BASIC Computer Games book was foundational and influential in early computing education, inspiring many commenters' programming careers
• DEC played a significant role in fostering educational computing, with David Ahl's work in educational product marketing essentially bootstrapping the computer gaming field
• Early computer guessing games deserve historical recognition and remain interesting enough to reimplement in modern languages
• These classic games are ripe for modern reinterpretation, as evidenced by the GitHub project rewriting them in contemporary languages

Opposed

• The article doesn't trace the lineage far enough — Mastermind (1970), Word Mastermind (1972), JOTTO (1955), MOO (1960s), and Bulls and Cows all predate DEC's 1973 WORD game
• Wordle's success has little to do with game design novelty and everything to do with implementation, COVID-era timing, and the one-per-day social mechanic
• Wordle is essentially just Mastermind with letters instead of colors — calling DEC's game a 'predecessor' overstates the originality of the concept