With my next megacrossword, I nudged past the late Robert Stilgenbauer’s record of 111 squares to a side, going for 125, with the help of Crossword Compiler designer Antony Lewis, who gave me a little “back door” to overcome the program’s usual 100-square limit. I called it Ubercross Cubed for a while to reference “squares taken to the max” and the fact that 125 is 5 cubed. But that was a little confusing to test audiences, so I matched the tone of the “Ubercross Fiddy” with the name “Ubercross C-Spot.”
This was not the success the Ubercross Fiddy had been some years earlier. Part of the problem was that in some respects, it was too big…it couldn’t be comfortably solved on a table the way its predecessor could, and internet screens were getting smaller as the world shifted more to mobile.
In an attempt to get around the latter issue, I sold some digital rights to the puzzle to the well-meaning designers of an app called CRUX, which offered a way to solve it through a narrow window on your phone. But the interface was imperfect for the puzzle’s largest, most interesting answers.
And part of the problem was that…though I’d beaten Stilgenbauer’s record…there were other crossword-size records out there in the larger world. Those records, I hadn’t yet touched. (Continued tomorrow.)