This is a news item of sorts.

But it’s also a personal story. Sometimes the two go hand in hand.

You’ve probably already heard of Wordle, the online word game that took the world by storm late last year. And you may have also played some of the derivative games that have come out in Wordle’s wake – like Dordle, where you’re solving two words at once, or Quordle, where you’re tackling four.

But what you may not know is that one of the most popular Wordle variants out there today actually got its start very close to home. For me, very very close to home.

For the last three and a half months (give or take a couple days), my husband Brad Bednar has been the creator of Sedecordle, a new word game that takes the Wordle concept and blows it up sixteen times.

“People played Wordle, they loved it,” he says. “Somebody made Dordle, which was two Wordles at once. Then there were four Wordles at once and eight Wordles at once. And no one had made a sixteen-at-once that I could find. And I thought – I have an afternoon free. I’ll just throw this together, upload it for a laugh, show it to our friends and then forget about it.”

This was back in February.

“Then it kind of went hot of its own accord.”

An interesting thing about the Internet: once you put something online, it theoretically reaches the entire world. And with seven billion people out there – if even a small percentage like what you’re doing, that adds up pretty quick.

“Every morning the first thing I (would) do when I wake up is watch that little line climb,” Brad says. “It was 800 (players), and then it was 10,000, and then it was 30,000. I was like, surely, surely it’s going to go no further than this.”

Within a month, Sedecordle had 200,000 users every day.

“It’s crazy how viral it’s gone so quickly,” he says. “People are playing on their phones, on their computers, on their PlayStations. I have one poor sucker in New York that’s (playing) on his smart TV.”

Celebrity Sedecordle fans include “Russian Doll” star Natasha Lyonne, and Joshua Malina of “West Wing” fame.

“(Malina is) one that I work into a conversation any chance I get,” Brad says. “One of his many fans responded to his (Sedecordle) score and said, how do you have time in your schedule to do this? And – personal highlight – he responded, ‘I’m prepping for a colonoscopy.'”

Another bizarre fact: “Sedecordle” is a word that did not exist until Brad created the game in February – but now, if you Google “Sedecordle,” it’ll bring up about 100,000 pages, plus another 4,500 videos.

“(The) surprising thing for me, though, has been (that) the Wordle variant community is very collegial,” he says. “We’re all friends. We trade bug fixes on Twitter … This is a community that’s bigger than just one person’s interest. It’s a good little family we’ve got going on.”

And of course that family also includes the hundreds of thousands of people who play the game as well.

“I get so much personal satisfaction of going on to Twitter and seeing, ‘my son and I got up early today, so we took 30 minutes and we did a Sedecordle together,'” he says. “Somebody sent me a message on Twitter saying, ‘my girlfriend’s birthday is coming up and we love this game. Would you record her a birthday message?’

“And, like, every time I see it pop up in a news article or a listicle about something, I’m blown away.”

That’s where we figured this cute story would end.

But then – completely out of the blue – Brad got an offer to sell Sedecordle.

“Some guy reached out to me and said, ‘Hey, I would like to buy your website.’ And then a couple days later I got another email that said, ‘Hey, if it helps, I’m willing to increase my offer to a much, much larger number.'”

Brad sold Sedecordle for a five-figure amount. That wasn’t the original plan, but he reconsidered when he thought about how that money could be used.

“You know, we’ve recently done something for SKJAJA, a charity we care about,” he says. “Like, I can take a lot of this money and give it to people who can do good.”

We made it official last week: Brad transferred the domain, the code and that all-important Twitter account to the new owner. And that’s where the story ends, at least for us.

But the story goes on for the game, which actually hits a big milestone on Tuesday: you can head to the website and play Sedecordle number 100.

“I’ve stumbled upon something accidentally that is, like, the secret sauce for a lot of people in their morning,” Brad says. “Things are kind of awful right now – what if you had 10 minutes of feeling good about yourself?”

And while internet fads come quickly and disappear even faster, at least for now Sedecordle is still going strong. And it all started right here.

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