Alright, let's get the justifications out of the way first. I know that Destructoid is a Video Game blog...but I think that as gamers most of us like games in all forms. Be it good old fashioned D&D or Trivial Pursuit or Poker or pinball or whatever, so I think there's room for "gaming related" posts. And that's what this is going to be.

Neatorama has a fascinating article up today about the history of the crossword puzzle. In fact they have also posted the world's first ever crossword puzzle which was written by Arthur Wayne and published in the New York World magazine in 1913.

Now I'm a big Crossword fan, going so far as buying the New York times Crossword Puzzle game for the DS. Which if you have a big commute and have maxed out all the classes in Puzzle Quest, is a highly recommended DS time passer.

The most fascinating thing about this post is the sense of Deja Vu I got when reading about the so called "Crossword Craze" of the 1920s. Take the following excerpt:

Some folks were driven over the edge by the craze. In 1924, a Chicago woman sued her husband for divorce, claiming "he was so engrossed in solving crosswords that he didn’t have time to work." The judge ordered the man to "limit himself to 3 puzzles a day and devote the rest of his time to domestic duties." In 1925, a New York Telephone Co. employee shot his wife when she wouldn’t help with a crossword puzzle. And in 1926, a Budapest man committed suicide, leaving an explanation in the form of a crossword puzzle. (No one could solve it.) Eventually, the craze died down. It took The New York Times to revive it.

It's like EverCrack wives and Chinese MMO-ers skipping bathroom breaks but 80 years ago.

It's so interesting to see how the more things change the more things stay the same. It's like now a days if you heard someone talking about "crossword addiction" it'd be laugable. Here's hoping that in 80 years the idea of "video game addiction" and "video games teaching you to kill" will seem just as quaint to our grandkids as this article is to us today.