In a YouTube video titled “If Wordle Existed in the 1980s…,” Squirrel Monkey offers an explanation of how the popular game is played while parodying the overtly blunt and often ludicrously corny instructional videos of the day. Featuring authentic VHS warble and muffled VO recorded in an echoey room, it’s hard to believe that the video was produced in the modern day. Plus, the video highlights an MS-DoS stylized recreation of Wordle that’s so strikingly genuine it would make the developer of the recently-released Bloodborne PSX demake blush.

RELATED: Wordle Chart Shows How Often Certain Letters Are Used In Puzzles

Part of the video’s charm comes from the hilariously out-of-touch words chosen by the presenters. Painstakingly hammering in guesses like “carom” and “xylan” on what might be a yellow-tinged IBM Model M keyboard, the video inadvertently offers a glimpse at how difficult Wordle might be were players left to their own devices sans perhaps a dictionary. Were the five-dollar words seen here to actually appear in a real game, players who believe Wordle to have become more pretentious since its recent acquisition by The New York Times would certainly be up in arms.

The second half of the video imagines what Wordle’s social features may have looked like were it developed during a time in which less than ten percent of US residents owned a home computer. Rather than sharing results online, this MS-DoS version of Wordle asked players to print their results and display them in the real world. It’s a far cry from the comparatively hyper-advanced tech of 2022 which allowed one savvy Reddit user to solve Wordle puzzles with a Raspberry Pi board and a 3D printer.

Squirrel Monkey has a suite of interesting videos which reimagine popular modern apps and programs in retro contexts. From a demake of Among Us contained on a 3.5 floppy disc to a strange iteration of Zoom decades before online video chat was possible, Squirrel Monkey’s videos, as advertised, feel as if they come from a parallel universe. Of course, cryptocurrency mining was apparently feasible on the Commodore 64, so who is to say that these retro redesigns are all that far removed from reality?

Wordle is available now.

MORE: Inappropriate Wordle Clone “Lewdle” Explained