Wordox was created in March 1999 by two American programmers; both named Brian - Brian Rothstein and Brian Fiete.
The ‘Brians’, as they were called, programmed the whole game in one week, taking advantage of the absence of most of their colleagues (who were attending a conference) to create the new game. It was also a good opportunity for them to test the server that they were developing.
Our programmers decided to create an easy to play online word game, and to complete it in only one week, so they could show it to their colleagues when they were back.
At first, they thought the letters should be hexagonal tiles, but it didn't function well. Then they decided that all tiles should be shared by all players, instead of belonging to each player separately. Since the players shared the tiles, they reasoned that if a player included the tiles of his opponent in his own words, the tiles should be displayed in a special colour for each player, and take on the colour of the player who had stolen the words from his opponent.
They chose a board composed of 13x13 squares. However, as these were filled too quickly, they decided to add special (pink) squares which would clear the board. They also created other coloured squares, mainly destined to enliven the board; thus were born the orange squares.
There was then further deliberation - should they assign more points to rare (and thus more difficult to play) letters like QZJXK? After a long discussion, one of the two ‘Brians’ considered that one should see instantly who had the most points, just by watching the dominant colour on the board. Therefore they decided to assign 1 point to each letter.
Then, they had to assign a function to the orange squares. At first they thought to give an additional point for each tile placed on these squares. Eventually, they decided to give these points to the player who clears the board (and thus enforce the role of the pink squares), to make a more dynamic game.
When all rules were defined, they played their first game. It was very funny, but they noticed that it was too easy to steal a word placed by an opponent by extending it with an "S" tile. To limit this, they decided that players must place at least two tiles.
One of the two ‘Brians’ proposed spontaneously to name the game "Gordox" and this was its first name. Later, a colleague suggested that they replace the G with a W and thus rename the game "Wordox". They adopted this new name.
Their colleagues were very impressed to discover this new game developed in their absence. At first, the bosses were not pleased that the ‘Brians’ had not done their job during this week, but eventually they recognized that it was not such a bad idea, as the game had become very popular.
Thus Wordox was born!
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