Steven Cravotta developed a word game called Wordle five years ago, no it's not that Wordle that you play every day, but they share the same name.
As you might imagine, Steven's old and largely forgotten app saw a sudden and huge influx of interest in recent months.
Since this Wordle game predates the new Wordle by many years, it was safe from Apple's recent culling of Wordle clones from its app store.
Steven Cravotta explained on Twitter that his app had not been as successful as he had hoped upon initial release "after a few months and ~100k total downloads, I stopped updating and promoting" and as such its numbers dwindled and the app was left to gather dust.
The new Wordle game is browser-based and has no app, but when it gained popularity and generated numerous stories in the media, curious players flocked to the app store in search of the hit new word-guessing game.
Steven said, "My Wordle app has gotten 200,000 downloads in the past 7 days, and it's not even slowing down yet."
Here's how a mobile game I built 5 years ago suddenly got blown up by The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Jimmy Fallon.
â€" Steven (@StevenCravotta) January 12, 2022
pic.twitter.com/aun7YM80p4
Suddenly, the old Wordle app was generating revenue again. Not content with sitting back and counting the dollars, Steven decided to reach out to the developer of the more popular Wordle, Josh Wardle, offering to donate the proceeds to charity.
In the Twitter thread, Steven revealed that he and Wardle has chosen West Oakland's youth literacy programme Boost to receive donations.
Josh Wardle tweeted, "Steven Cravotta reached out to me unprompted and asked about donating the proceeds. He's a class act and you should follow him."
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